
Y Combinator Challenge #11 - Office Competitor - drm237
http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/y-combinator-challenge-11-office-competitor/
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davi
Assignment incomplete:

"Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared
to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven’t taken the world
by storm, and how you’re going to beat that."

The author needs to deal with this head-on.

To some extent he addresses it implicitly by talking about gaining traction
the same way Facebook did. This implies that the author thinks that existing
web Office tools haven't gained traction because they're too diffusely
targeted. The author seems to think that if a web Office tool had a clustered
communities of users, this would somehow drive adoption of a web Office
replacement. This is an interesting idea, but I think it's inadequately
motivated in the writeup. Do college students comprise the right population
for these sorts of clusters? I don't think so. I think college students
collaborate too infrequently for them to bother adopting such a tool,
especially on projects requiring Office-like functionality. If they need to
collaborate in this way (once or twice in their career?) they'll just email
each other Office documents, or _maybe_ use Google Docs.

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kleneway
You caught me, man! I actually did have a few paragraphs tackling this but to
be perfectly honest A) it was really boring and B) given my status as an MS
employee I do need to be a little careful with what I say around this. Not
even so much around pro-Microsoft stuff, but more around stuff that is against
efforts that our competitors are doing. In other words, to fully address this
I'd have to talk smack on Google docs, which could be seen as what we like to
call in the consulting world as a CLM (career limiting move) :)

That being said, anyone who has been using web-based Office alternatives and
wants to address this, I'd love to hear thoughts either here or within the
comments in the original post.

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davi
It's a huge market, and it's uncracked despite user pain. Why?

It's a boring question in terms of technology, but not in terms of thinking
about user needs and behavior. And it's pretty interesting in terms of the
amount of money that could flow if the market were cracked, too.

I think the two big reasons the Office market remains uncracked are:

1) incompatibility fears

2) opportunity cost

Incompatibility fear is a big one. A good friend refuses to use MS Office for
Mac because she is afraid of incompatibilities. This is rational. The
documents she's sending out impinge on multimillion dollar deals, some of
which get finalized at the 11th hour. She can't tolerate additional risk in
her workflow.

Continuing to use her, and Office for Mac, as an example, "opportunity cost"
means that she can bill to her clients at a pretty good hourly rate, or she
can spend her time learning about and deploying Parallels and Bootcamp so she
could enjoy OS X and still be confident that her Office documents will be
viewable and editable by her colleagues. This just isn't a good use of her
time, unless she happens to enjoy technical puttering (she doesn't).

I think she's pretty emblematic of this problem. If you can't get her to use
an web-based Office substitute, I submit that you haven't cracked the Office
market.

I think that this problem is harder, and in some ways more interesting, than
the technical problem of how to make a nifty Office-like web app.

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dangoldin
I don't see this as that much different from Google Docs.

A little bit more social features and an emphasis on the college crowd but
that's all.

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kleneway
Same thing could have been said about Facebook re: MySpace. :)

Seriously though, this is a good point. Any time you go up against a
competitor with a product in market, billions in the bank, and a huge
incentive to make there product succeed at all costs, you better have a pretty
frickin' solid differentiation story before you start down this path...even
then, good luck...

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JimEngland
He has the idea down to perfection. Somebody start making this!

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kleneway
Thanks Jim! I gotta say, out of all the ideas I've posted so far, this one is
probably my favorite. If anyone does want to pick this up, shoot me a mail at
kleneway@hotmail.com and I can offer some additional thoughts and features
that I didn't have time to detail out in the post (free of charge + no strings
attached, as always).

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a-priori
I think university students would also like an easy way to make documents that
follow the guidelines of various journals.

For example, when I need to follow APA style, I use the LaTeX "apa.cls"
document class. However, I think the average psych student manually formats
their documents in Word.

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hugh
I'm not sure about this idea.

I think the problem with existing web-based Office substitutes isn't a problem
of segmenting the market -- the problem is that they're just not as good as
Office. In particular, they're slower, uglier and always seem to be missing
some of everyone's favourite features. Office isn't perfect, but it's almost
always fast, and it has a _lot_ of features.

Get the implementation right, and you've got a great Office competitor. But
given the limitations on the speed of a web-based application I'm not
convinced it's possible (but keen to be proven wrong!)

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kajecounterhack
College kids have DC++, Demonoid, ThePiratebay, and very little sense of
ethics.

Not gonna work.

In fact, I feel as if this will never really take off for the simple reason
that people don't want to have to be connected just to edit their word
documents. They want to do that anywhere, connection or not, and as such
office apps wont be ported to the internet on a wide scale unless they have
something else to offer.

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JimEngland
They could just add in Gears support with some sort of merging rules for when
the changes are posted back online.

Also, I believe that this idea has a lot to offer. The added value to the
college student is the easy collaboration and especially social networking. I
could see freshmen students using this because it both helps with their
schoolwork and also connects them with other students for homework and
projects.

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gojomo
Beware Microsoft employees bearing startup ideas.

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kleneway
Startup ideas are just the beginning of my plot. These ideas are really just
my way of getting some attention prior to the release of my new site:
ClubbingBabySeals.com. Once that IPOs, I should have enough money to buy a
really, really, really big laser that I can use to etch the Windows logo into
the moon.

~~~
gojomo
Don't leak tomorrow's '#12 fix advertising' idea about the moon laser early!

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volida
scribd should do this. they have a big opportunity if they do it right.

