Writely - The Back Story

Sam, Steve, and Claudia have done it.  Writely is now part of Google.  Here’s the back story to this ‘overnight success’ that every Web 2.0 developer should know.   Overnight success is part of the Myth of Silicon Valley. This overnight success is twenty years in the making. And I think it means the business-as-feature GYM shopping spree is going to slow down from here.

Back in July when Sam and I were having coffee, he asked my opinion about a bunch of ideas he, Steve, and Claudia had been working on.  One was “Flickr for Documents”.  That afternoon they began to focus on what became Writely.  So you could (erroneously) conclude that this was another Web 2.0 one hit wonder with a nice UI  and LAMP after a few months.

I’ve known Sam and Steve for about nine years.  They have been in the application software business for nearly 20 years.  Two important themes arise from this.  First, they aren’t generic applications software guys.  Every major product they have shipped has been about “documents” but on successive platforms. 

1. They were the authors of FullPaint and FullWrite  -- the largest selling third party word processing and painting apps on the original Macs.
2. They developed the first cross-platform (Mac, Windows) WYSYG HTML editor which came to market as Claris Home Page.
3. They developed the re-design and built the underlying platform to Macromedia’s re-write of DreamWeaver.
4. Now they have built Writely.

I’ve seen them build two major sources of expertise in this concentration.  First, they understand the user problem so deeply that they can blend the advantages of each new platform with ‘document authoring problem’ to really build a platform-native solution, not a clone of someone else’s work.    Second, before tackling the development of the application, they develop a library of services and tools that they know will be required to bang out the kinds of features and performance an authoring application requires. 

The first advantage is their intuitive “MRD”.  The second is their secret sauce for rapid application development.   Both benefit from having been repeated over multiple computing platforms. So what appears to be 7-8 months of effort is really built on years of experience expressed in a continuously evolving code base.   

Personally, I think purchase by Google this is the market “top” for Web 2.0 feature acquisitions. The bar is raising for Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Few Web 2.0 companies have this sort of prior art.  Put another way, most Web 2.0 companies really are six months of engineering on a LAMP stack.  From what I know of Sam and Steve’s ability to time the market’s hunger for product acquisitions.  I’ve learned they are the Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger of software.

Comments

[Michael McDerment]

Thanks for the back story on this one Peter...was sort of scratching my head (ala some Web 2.0 other acquisitions), but this helps it make sense.

[Wille Faler]

Speaking as a reasonably competent and seasoned software engineer and (less seasoned) entrepreneur, I'd say that the "6 months of engineering on a LAMP stack" is a gross overstatement:

A lot (not all though) of the stuff that is bouncing around at the moment should not be much more than 1-2 months of effort for one man to pull off, at least for an initial decent release of at least SOMETHING.

That being said, makes me wonder: what are the actual defensible differentiators for a lot of these Web 2.0 companies? A lot of the time, the only real thing I could point to seems to be userbase and somehow being able to build in network effects that makes the product/service more valuable the more people use it. And that is not something that can be done for every concept.

[Robert Young]

Excellent insight... and great advice for entrepreneurs.

Looking forward to a similar "back story" when Riya is acquired by Murdoch. :-)

[Peter Rip]

I prefer to think of it the other way around.

[pwb]

Writely is surprisingly not LAMP but instead .net which I think accounts for much of the user experience clumsiness (random windows opening, pop-ups blocked, click delays, general sluggishness, etc.).

[Simon Brocklehurst]

Peter,

Can you share with us your understanding of Google's rationale for acquiring Writely? I've read Claudia's blog detailing Sam's, Steve's, Claudia's and Jen's top ten "reasons" for wanting to be part of Google - but those don't tell us why Google wanted to buy Writely.

[Sandro G.]

thanks for this post, it really shred lights on how these things works!
i've lost trough the lines if they have bought the software or the people instead?