Hao's Document

write an Office Add-in (based on Word API) that supports all the desired collaborative features listed in the previous section.

The reason behind this recommendation follows: Online document editing is already a very hot area. There used to be quite a few online editors a few years ago on the market but today it pretty much boils down to Google Doc (dominant) and Zoho. They both target small businesses and compete directly with Microsoft Word. Adobe buzzword hasn’t picked up any meaningful market share in that space with their sleek flex application. Therefore, it would be unwise for us try to compete with them by offering another feature-rich online editor.

If we license a third-party editor (assuming there is one for us to license), we will be limited by the capabilities exposed by that editor. Moreover, we will never gain a competitive edge in terms online collaboration over the vendor of that editor. This is because (1) they own the editor (2) a natural direction to further development of an online editor is collaboration. So they will almost certain invest in collaboration on top their editor. So we can probably only be a second-class player in that space.

We believe our way to compete is some kind of a scratch book. The scratch book is limited as a full-blown editor (for example, the scratch book can support plain text only to start with) but we’ll innovate heavily on collaboration features (which is still a very young area). Because the editor itself is simple, it’s easier for us to focus on collaboration from technology and resource perspectives. We’ll then expand the editor features (such as images, tables and equations) once we see some initial success. It’s important to support capabilities to import/export to/from the scratch book to popular formats such as Microsoft word and Google docs.

In summary, we should position ourselves as the leading online collaborative scratch book in the world. In other words, we’ll basically build a redliner style product.