Congrats to Writely for using .NET to get acquired by Google

To the people who say Writely had no users: on Oct 23 last year they had about 34000, a little over two weeks later on Nov 8 they had about 50000 so just imagine where they’d be now 4 months later (those are the only actual numbers I have).

My source is comments by one of the Upstartle (company that made Writely) employees at http://forums.topcoder.com/?module=Thread&threadID=507554&start=25&mc=45#531597

One of his comments that’s of particular interest: “They love to pick up on the “look out, Microsoft!” theme, for instance. But really we’re complementary to Word, not competing with it.”

Well.. if .NET is that cool, why is Hotmail using PHP ha?

Another question someone asked that I forgot to answer in my last post is answered on that page too. They’re not using SQL Server or any other big enterprise (expensive) database.

“Well.. if .NET is that cool, why is Hotmail using PHP ha?”

Hotmail wasn’t originally made by Microsoft. They bought it from someone who had made it in PHP, and modified it a little but weren’t going to completely rewrite it. (And of course .NET wasn’t out when Hotmail was invented). And you may have noticed that Hotmail is now being/will soon be replaced by Windows Live Mail, which uses – you guessed it – ASP.NET.

Something else about Google (humor me, I had a hard week): has there ever been a company that grew so rich so fast at the behest of competitors? IOW, Google reaches 90% of its customers via a competitor’s platform (Windows) utilizing a (potential competitor’s) backbone (the telcos). Maybe that’s why they are buying up dark fiber and office applications?

So Google’s going to be the next Microsoft/AT&T?

Okay.

“Hotmail wasn’t originally made by Microsoft. They bought it from someone who had made it in PHP”

Ohh yes I forgot… probably because that happened.. 8 years ago? When PHP was about the second or third release?

Time enought to translate to any language don’t you think?

Let’s get real, .NET is not an awesome framework to make any difference with the rest.

““Hotmail wasn’t originally made by Microsoft. They bought it from someone who had made it in PHP”

Ohh yes I forgot… probably because that happened.. 8 years ago? When PHP was about the second or third release?”

Look up php and mail, or better yet phpmail on google today, I think you’ll find some interesting results. Programs have gotten alot better than hotmail.

@ Christopher Hawkins:

“You know very well what I was getting at when I said that AJAXY, non-Microsoft apps get all the love these days.”

Writely is a) AJAXy and b) non-Microsoft. What other invalid distinctions are you going to come up with to cover for your lack of knowledge about what AJAX is?

Hell, MICROSOFT themselves have released an AJAX toolkit as part of ASP.NET – Atlas. http://www.asp.net/default.aspx?tabindex=9&tabid=47

Ironic that .net helped them build it. In the end, writely could undermine Microsoft Word. It’s getting pretty good, and improving all the time.

I work from home – and my business partner is in another part of London – so when we are working on something together we co-operate on writely. It’s a bit like logging onto a blog post.

“Writely is a) AJAXy and b) non-Microsoft. ”

It was built with .NET, which – last time I checked – was indeed a Microsoft technology.

Keep trying, though.

“Writely is a) AJAXy and b) non-Microsoft. ”

It was built with .NET, which – last time I checked – was indeed a Microsoft technology.

Keep trying, though.

Google’s Orkut is implemented in .NET. At least all the pages end in “.aspx”.

Dan – Just a guess, you don’t know much about quantum physics either. Seeing “What the Bleep do we Know?” twice does not count.

While you are at it, why not congratulate Onfolio for being picked up by Microsoft. I saw the app mentioned by Scoble and have used it ever since.

Ouch.. that *has* too hurt. Writely used .NET to build a product which they will sell to Google which they’ll use to take on Office (one of Microsofts major cash cows). Talk about insult to injury

Kevin

Google’s Orkut is implemented in .NET.

The orkut they had to take down because of security concerns?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/27/security_bugs_floor_googles_friendsterclone/

Another question someone asked that I forgot to answer in my last post is answered on that page too. They’re not using SQL Server or any other big enterprise (expensive) database.

That’s the beauty of .NET! You can connect to ANY ODBC or OleDb data source. My blog engine used to be WordPress which had a mySQL database. I created my own blog engine in ASP.NET 2.0 (C#) and used a Microsoft Access database until I port to SQL server. Well, with .NET I was able to read the posts from my mySQL database. Just recently I created a function in C# to loop through the mySQL database and rewrite everything to my Access database.

I love .NET because it has a one-to-many relationship with existing technologies. This isn’t the case with PHP I am afraid.

Message 75:

It’s “MySQL” not “mySQL”, genius.

This isn’t the case with PHP I am afraid.

Really? You googled for a php connector to an MS Access database and didn’t find any results?

Rory -

I certainly don’t claim to be a quantum physics expert. I took enough physics at Berkeley to realize that I am definitely *not* a physicist.

I do know that electrons were thought to be indistinguishable until spin was discovered.

And my point wasn’t what an expert I am; it’s that “Blogreader” had made a bogus comparison (Post 9) implying that using different development platforms was akin to using different power companies. It’s a false analogy.

#75 – really? I coulda sworn there are _native_ drivers in PHP for Oracle, DB2, Postgres, MySQL, Informix, and a host of other databases (and, of course, ODBC)?

As an aside, there are plenty of examples of folks dropping .NET for LAMP, including (recently) one of the hot startups YouSendIt: beta.yousendit.com is now LAMP-based.

Reminds me of the whole Fellowship Church affair from last year that Robert wrote about.

Has anybody done a analysis of web 2.0 apps to see what platforms are being employed across the universe.

That would be interesting to see!

#81 – yes, I checked out Article Dashboard’s “Top 10 Web 2.0 applications”. Seven were PHP-based, one appeared to be Perl, and two were .NET.