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Enter Zenter: "We want to be the Gmail of PowerPoint."
- zaidf 20y ago"Gmail of Powerpoint"? Am I the only one who is struggling to make sense of what that means?
- danielha 20y agoThink of Outlook, Thunderbird, Pine, what have you.
- zach 20y agoNo, me too. Sounds pretty vapid, to be blunt.
- omarish 20y agoGmail did a pretty good job redoing a certain technology, web based email, in this case. Powerpoint is a technology that needs reworking.
- far33d 20y agoremember pb's (to distinguish him from pg) definition of a good product: the suffix "that actually works".
- zach 20y agoThat's looking at it from the business's point of view, not the users' point of view. Also, it still doesn't make much sense.
- run4yourlives 20y agoIt does? Seems to work just fine... everyone uses it, unless they use macs.
- aristus 20y agoThis is a really cool idea, but I wonder about the danger of falling into the "X of Y" or "A meets B" style of describing software. "X of Y" is how Hollywood describes new scripts. The danger is that this is also how Hollywood comes up with new scripts. Have we gone whole hog and transformed into a fashion industry? Are we optimizing for quick wins, sequels of existing software, at the expense of real innovation?
- zaidf 20y agoI don't personally have a problem with using that manner of description when it can describe the GENERAL idea of your business in few words. ie. Google in its starting days could say "Kinda like Yahoo Search" or iPod could say "Better than your walkman" Problem here is the X of Y description doesn't make obvious sense, at least to me.
- palish 20y agoThere's a large difference between the entertainment industry and the web application industry. Since the beginning of inventions, people have been crossing seemingly unrelated things to discover beautiful new insights. Because we create value, if "The Facebook of Wikipedia" is valuable, then it's safe to describe it in those terms; in fact, it's safe to come up with entirely new products in those terms. However, you should note that you probably won't be creating / riding the Next Big Wave by crafting new things in terms of existing things.
- zach 20y agoAnd yet YouTube is the Flickr of Flash videos, right? And Google was the better-AltaVista of AltaVista. I'm just saying, those are pretty big waves.
- palish 20y agoWell, what I meant was that it's a dangerous frame of mind to look for innovation only by crossing existing things. Originality helps :)
- zach 20y agoSee, it's like "pre-zenter." Took me a while to get that.
- belhassen 20y agoonline sample: http://www.zenter.com/ed/view.html?id=226 http://www.zenter.com/ed/view.html?id=226
- nickb 20y agoIf the rumors are true, they'll have to worry about Google...
- ecuzzillo 20y agoYeah, I can totally see this being smooshed by Google like Kiko was. PG said that Google was only good at stuff that worked for hackers, but I bet it could parlay its Gmail userbase into a Zenter-killing web-based Powerpoint, even though hackers don't generally do that much powerpoint.
- johnm 20y agoMight be nice if it worked under Safari rather than just hanging. :-(
- inklesspen 20y agoIsn't Google building the Gmail of PowerPoint? I've heard rumblings of "Google Present" for some time now. Let's hope these guys don't go the way of Kiko; they sound like they have some pretty good ideas.
- danielha 20y agoA Google Presently is in the works. I'm don't know the differences in approach compared with Zenter, but we should find out more as Google formally announces Presently and Zenter opens up a bit more to the public.