Web-based Word Processor Written in C

Posted on October 6, 2005

The O'Reilly Rader has an interesting blog post about the code and platform behind Writerly, a new web-based word processor.

I spent a fun hour talking with Sam Schillace of Writely. We talked about the uptake (enormous) and different approaches to the idea of word processing on the web, but two things really stuck with me: platform and people. Every entrepreneur wants there to be a secret sauce for success -- if you use Ajax, or Linux, or tagging, or (insert delicious top tag du jour) you'll have a great product. Sam's secret sauce isn't platform.
That said, the platform is interesting. Writely is written in C# and deployed on Windows boxes. This isn't interesting because of "oooh, he's using The Enemy" or any nonsense like that, it's interesting because this makes it the first Web 2.0 success that I can think of that was written in .NET. That's an interesting datapoint in and of itself. The reason for choosing C#, other than "we had Visual Studio laying around", was the integrated debugging of browser and server components. He demo'd it for me, and it's mindblowingly useful. It is to Venkman as Venkman is to alert("foo has value " + foo).

More people seem to be using web-based software for things like event planning, lists organizing and now we have web-based word processors. The key here will be the security because not many people will use these kinds of tools if others can hack in and see their private files. More web-based tools are on the way: Sun has launched OpenOffice and Slashdot has