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Ajax May Drive Serious Challenge to Microsoft Office
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03/24/2006, By Enterprise Open Source News Desk
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Michael Robertson, who started Linspire, née Lindows, the Linux operating system company that managed to receive a $20 million settlement out of Microsoft after Microsoft sued it for trademark infringement, is instroducing ajaxWrite, now just a rudimentary word processor-in-the-making. But Robertson, who says he secretly started a new company last year to house the overall effort, is promising to deliver software that replaces all of the pieces in the pricey Office suite - and he says it will all be free.
ajaxWrite is browser-accessible from any Windows, Mac or Linux computer using Firefox 1.5 or better. It's supposed to load instantly, and supposed to have 85% of Office's functionality, which should suit most people. It lacks features like numbered footnotes, but Robertson says that users who need features like that should use OpenOffice.
ajaxWrite is still in beta and lacks features such as a spellchecker that are supposed to be on the way. It may also have bugs. Early users are asked to report them. The ajaxWrite program is reportedly just 330K at this point, and is supposed to load in 15 seconds, where its performance is then gated by the underlying hardware, although Robertson also claims that it runs "equally well" on a low-powered laptop as on a high-powered desktop.
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