What was left of Bill Gates' headless body exploded in a puff of smoke after word was received that a Web-based word processing program compatible with Microsoft Word is being offered for free.
AJAX is a collection of software technologies that allow Web-based applications like word processors to have much better interfaces and to work much more smoothly. Ajaxwrite.com is a new Web-based venture that is offering a Web-based, Word-compatible word processor for free.
You just go to the Web site, click on the ajaxWrite icon, and you are ready to open a Word document from your hard drive. Unlike Google's plans in this area to store all your documents on Google servers, ajaxWrite reads and writes to your own computer hard drive--a big difference.
I tried it on a couple of Word documents, and it works okay, although some text alignment was off a bit. But this has tremendous promise. Schools, which are groaning under the weight of buying and maintaining hundreds or thousands of copies of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on individual machines, can just wipe all that software off those hard drives in the near future and use these Web-based tools. And for a lot of casual users who don't need a $500 copy of Microsoft Office, this will be fine for family correspondance and homework.
This effort is led by the guy behind other open source projects like Gizmo, the free VoIP phone software, and he notes that the new company plans to release a new application every week. Every week--that's not a typo. Contrast that to Microsft, who is having trouble getting new software out the door every three years.
Oh, and there is one more thing. AjaxWrite is being tested primarily on Firefox, the open source browswer. So if it is successful, there will be more migration from the aging and creaky Internet Explorer and towards Firefox, which is updated regularly, and is free.