Who says a web-based office suite doesn’t make sense? I’m writing this post in Writely, a web-based word processor that supports posting to weblogs (complete with preview mode) as well as real-time collaboration, basic document management, and several other very nice features. It even does auto-save, and there’s a spell checker too, complete with squiggly lines underneath misspelled words.

I decided to give Writely a try after Steve Rubel explained how he uses it to draft blog posts, thinking it might make a nice alternative to the antiquated TEXTAREA widget that is, remarkably enough, still the primary interface for editing the web after all these years.

Now that I’m using it, though, I’m beginning to see how it could grow into more than that, at least for me. Sure, it’s fairly simplistic, but it does all the basics reasonably well, so that’s actually a feature (Steve says: “Think of it as Microsoft Word for the Web – except with just the parts you need!”). Combine that with the ability to access my documents from any computer, as well as the collaboration facilities (which look interesting and appear to go above and beyond the heavyweight email-based collaboration features found in more traditional office suites, though I haven’t tried them yet), and I’m intrigued.

Now, if there were only a Writely component I could include in other web applications, or maybe even graft in as a substitute for the TEXTAREAs on arbitrary webpages using some sort of Firefox extension or Greasemonkey script. I’d love to see support for the Open Document Format too, so I could use Writely as a sort of document store and pass documents between thin client and fat client seamlessly. Then we’d be getting into really intriguing territory. (While I’m at it, a way to pull down the templates and style sheets from my weblog for a true WYSIWYG editing experience would be very nice too. Heck, as long as we’re thinking outside the box, why not just allow me to edit the page directly?)

(As I’m writing this, I can’t help but think of the Innovator’s Dilemma, i.e., market leaders continuing to stuff more and more features into products that fewer and fewer people actually need to fuel the relentless drive upmarket, opening themselves up to attacks from below by providers of “good enough” products..)

Update: I couldn’t get the blog posting feature of Writely to work, so I ended up copying-and-pasting the HTML into WordPress. Oh, well. On a brighter note, while I was fiddling with the blog posting feature, CNET News.com reported that Writely is adding support for the Open Document Format and intends to add support for PDF too. Suite!

Dave Winer: “So we need some way to share subscriptions between different applications, between vendors — we need an way to do that that works when the lists are small, and one that works when the lists grow large. Most important, it needs to be open, and in order to be really open it has to be simple, so that no vendor can use their large size as a way of keeping smaller competitors out of the market. We’ve seen that when this happens innovation stops. Let’s learn from our past mistakes, and not make it so easy to dominate a market. Compatibility should never be a reason to choose one product over another. Let performance, features and price drive the market, not the obscurity of the wires connecting the apps together.”

Ray Ozzie: “As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this ‘mesh’ model. The websites, services and servers we build seem to all want to be the ‘owner’ and ‘publisher’; it’s really inconsistent with the model that made email so successful, and the loosely-coupled nature of the web.”

Great stuff. Can’t wait to see what comes of this. Personally, I think synchronization is going to be one of the key platform features of Web 2.0. As I’ve said before, I simply don’t buy that we’re just around the corner from ubiquitious network connectivity, and absent that, we’re going to have to deal effectively with the disconnected operation problem.

Om Malik: “[O]n this Web 2.0 highway, there are three exits: Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.”

That’s a clever soundbite, and perhaps it’s true from the venture capitalist’s point of view, but I think it misses something fundamental: That the real attraction of the new web platform is that components don’t have to be rolled up into one big monolith anymore to integrate well with each other.

We’re entering into a world where lots of little, independent component providers will be able to coexist and thrive alongside the platform vendors. Why? The platform vendors no longer have such a chokehold on distribution that the best the component providers can hope for are a few years of prosperity before the platform vendor notices there’s an interesting little market emerging around a particular component, integrates the component into the platform, and renders the independent component unnecessary. In the old world, a component provider’s prosperity was often its ultimate undoing.

I’ve always sympathized with the platform vendors’ (OK, Microsoft’s) argument that this kind of integration is done in the interest of customer convenience—I for one don’t want to buy an operating system only to have to go out and source my own, say, memory management and data compression components (something, if you remember, we had to do in the MS-DOS days). In the old world, that probably meant going out, buying more software, and dealing with the headache of getting it installed and integrated. It was simply more convenient for the customer for the popular components to find their way into the platform, integrated and ready to go with no assembly required.

In the new world, though, sourcing a component is no longer a heavyweight operation. By and large, the components themselves are free, and thanks to open APIs and data formats like RSS, it’s now possible to integrate those components into larger applications with comparative ease. Granted, the applications of today are largely ad hoc “mash ups” without an intermediating platform vendor in the traditional sense, but it won’t be long, in my view, before vendors step into that role and make writing such applications as systematized an operation as, say, writing an application for Windows or Linux is today.

Yes, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are probably those vendors. Yes, the component providers probably hook into their platforms as the primary vehicle for monetizing their wares. However, without the same level of control over distribution that the old world enjoyed (not to mention the proliferation of open APIs and data formats), the big guys will have to coexist with the little guys.

The platform vendors will compete by providing the most compelling incentive to the component providers. In old world terms, the platform with the most ISVs will win. This bodes very well indeed for innovation in the new “Web 2.0” world. Above all, the days of the platform vendors integrating all the components into the platform to the exclusion of independent providers have come and gone.

Thankfully.