Y Combinator Challenge #11 - Office Competitor

Assignment incomplete:<p>"Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven’t taken the world by storm, and how you’re going to beat that."<p>The author needs to deal with this head-on.<p>To some extent he addresses it implicitly by talking about gaining traction the same way Facebook did. This implies that the author thinks that existing web Office tools haven't gained traction because they're too diffusely targeted. The author seems to think that if a web Office tool had a clustered communities of users, this would somehow drive adoption of a web Office replacement. This is an interesting idea, but I think it's inadequately motivated in the writeup. Do college students comprise the right population for these sorts of clusters? I don't think so. I think college students collaborate too infrequently for them to bother adopting such a tool, especially on projects requiring Office-like functionality. If they need to collaborate in this way (once or twice in their career?) they'll just email each other Office documents, or <i>maybe</i> use Google Docs.

I don't see this as that much different from Google Docs.<p>A little bit more social features and an emphasis on the college crowd but that's all.

He has the idea down to perfection. Somebody start making this!

I think university students would also like an easy way to make documents that follow the guidelines of various journals.<p>For example, when I need to follow APA style, I use the LaTeX "apa.cls" document class. However, I think the average psych student manually formats their documents in Word.

I'm not sure about this idea.<p>I think the problem with existing web-based Office substitutes isn't a problem of segmenting the market -- the problem is that they're just not as good as Office. In particular, they're slower, uglier and always seem to be missing some of everyone's favourite features. Office isn't perfect, but it's almost always fast, and it has a <i>lot</i> of features.<p>Get the implementation right, and you've got a great Office competitor. But given the limitations on the speed of a web-based application I'm not convinced it's possible (but keen to be proven wrong!)

College kids have DC++, Demonoid, ThePiratebay, and very little sense of ethics.<p>Not gonna work.<p>In fact, I feel as if this will never really take off for the simple reason that people don't want to have to be connected just to edit their word documents. They want to do that anywhere, connection or not, and as such office apps wont be ported to the internet on a wide scale unless they have something else to offer.

Beware Microsoft employees bearing startup ideas.

scribd should do this. they have a big opportunity if they do it right.