Stories about: Zoho

Google, which celebrates 10 years of its incorporation this month, remains strongly committed to its Enterprise unit and to the customers it serves, including IT and business managers and CIOs, although most of the company's revenue comes from online advertising.

Most computer industry companies would feel satisfied with ruling the highly lucrative and technically complex search engine advertising market -- but not Google.

The term "Project Management" usually brings pained looks to business people because they associate it with Microsoft Project. The tool may make their lives easier, but the software costs hundreds of dollars per user, and worse, the desktop-centric management application of yesterday doesn't fit well with the distributed workforce reality of today. What's more, when you take the plunge, getting up to speed on the methodology takes time before you see results.

Here's an interesting strategy for a new software company: create applications that place you squarely in the competitive sights of Google and Microsoft, bypass venture capital funding, and rebuff an acquisition offer from Salesforce.com, the surging software as a service (SaaS) company that delivers its products over the Web.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

There are few pieces of software that users touch more often than office productivity suites. The market monster is, of course, Microsoft Office, with the lion's share of all licenses for office productivity tools. But two trends -- open source and cloud computing -- are offering a new generation of Office alternatives that businesses may want to consider.

Open source and cloud computing alternatives can replace Office in some circumstances

The official rollout on Tuesday of IBM's Lotus Symphony suite of productivity applications along with the launch yesterday of the official beta version of Acrobat.com from Adobe has all the experts asking the same well-worn questions: Now that Adobe, IBM, and Google all have skin in this game, is Microsoft Office under siege yet? And which online offering comes closest to being a viable alternative?

In early March, during an annual conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced it was launching Microsoft Office SharePoint Online. While the idea was to provide a lightweight version of SharePoint as a hosted offering, analysts say the product has been presented in a way to avoid cannibalizing Microsoft's bread-and-butter installed software product, Office.

Since its inception, the Web has been synonymous with the browser. Pundits hailed NCSA Mosaic as "the killer app of the Internet" in 1993, and today's browsers share an unbroken lineage from that humble beginning.

There are many popular, low-cost ways to toss text onto the Web, from blogs and Google Docs to social networking sites. Likewise, you can find a lot of sites where you can post photos and videos. But until recently, less attention has been paid to online databases -- and that's a pity, because lots of people besides database geeks would benefit from a bit more structure to their data.