Writely: Free Internet-Based Word Processor

When reading a Washington Post article entitled Microsoft is losing some of its elbow room, which discusses some of the challenges that Microsoft is up against, I came across this little bit of info tucked away in the middle of the article:

Upstartle LLC offers an online program for creating, writing and sharing documents. Whereas the Microsoft Office suite that includes such tools costs more than $140, Upstartle's Writely.com service is free, with add-on features to be made available for a subscription fee later.

This certainly piqued my curiosity. How cool would it be to have a free web-based word processor? All my docs are saved right up there, accessible anywhere, totally platform-independent. And it's - hello?! - free!

So I went ahead and gave Writely a whirl. It's quite a promising start. It's simple and straightforward. And it does what it says it does well.

However, the big drawback is its limited functionality. Sure, it lets you type, do basic formatting, add tables, etc., but there's no way to do some of the more advanced things available in Word and other word processors, such as add footnotes, do outline numbering, and make table of contents or table of authorities, all of which would be key to me moving my legal writing activities over to this.

The second problem I see with this is the ominous "with add-on features to be made available for a subscription fee later". Does that mean I'm going to have to pay some kind of subscription to get the same stuff I get in Word? While pricing would be an important issue in determining whether I use it or not, any cost at all would make me a good deal less likely to use this service since I'm already giving up full functionality while in internetless places like the cabin of an airplane.

So what does this call for? Google. Google needs to come in and buy Writely, improve it and most importantly keep it free. This would fit well into Google's pattern of letting users create or collect content while generating revenues through ads on those pages (à la Gmail) or by simply adding the content to Google's massive database (and thereby making Google's search more effective) and trying to get users to use AdSense (à la Blogger). The synergy between Writely and Google seem obvious to me. Let's hope Google will jump on this.

Oh, and can we hurry up and get Safari support already! Switching to a compatible browser is such a pain.