Congrats to the Writely folks. They said they were building to flip, and they did. Build the feature missing in the portfolio, forget about the revenue model. Unfortunately it's status quo for a valley that doesn't aspire to be anything more. But they did execute their goal, so credit is deserved, and now they can set a new goal.
For other entrepreneurs, don't choose other's goals as your own. Find your own. And don't worry, there will be no monopoly over the read/write web. The web part is just beginning. For VCs, keep it together.
At Web 2.0, Battelle asked Sergey if they were building the office web. He said, why build what already exists? I still believe that.
On a Google Office: I don't really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly, and say can 'we do the minicomuter on the Web on AJAX,' makes sense. I'm not saying that's what [Microsoft] Office is, I'm just saying that I think the Web and Web 2.0, if that's what you want to call it, gives you the opportunity to do new and better things than the Office package and more. We don't have any plans [to do an office suite].
