

Ask HN: Current hosted document editing/sharing systems and their direction? - cpr

I'm looking at a start-up opportunity (within my existing small company) based on connecting to existing hosted document systems such as Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Zimbra docs, buzzword.com, etc. (including photoshop.com for pictures, etc.) I guess there's also whatever Microsoft does with Office Online. (Are there other major such services I'm forgetting?)<p>This might sound naive, but how would one go about figuring the relative popularity of these kinds of services and their trajectories?<p>These kinds of systems are clearly gaining momentum, but one rarely hears about them in the day-to-day noise of the webosphere.<p>Do you think they're headed for (mostly) replacement of the desktop-based office suites? Or will the desktop-based suites fight back and maintain some market share long-term?<p>Or is classical online document editing going to fade away in the face of other collaboration methods like wikis? (I don't think so, ultimately, but it's certainly possible.)
======
Tangurena
Have you been forgetting Sharepoint? It is my belief that Microsoft-centric
businesses will eventually move towards Sharepoint for document storage.

My suspicion is that Sharepoint and Infopath will become more popular with
business users. Like the way that many companies have home-grown apps that
started as Access and Excel things, and grew into "mission critical" stuff as
time goes by, I suspect that SP and IP will do similar in the next decade.

