Don’t get me wrong, I heart Open Office — and by "heart" I mean I rub my cd-tray whenever I’m working in it *shakes it off* — but it’s interface just isn’t as refined/clean/friendly as Microsoft Office 2003’s. Too bad it M$ Office costs a small fortune and only runs in Window$ 
These madmen/chicks at ThinkFree might be onto something by totally ripping off the Microsoft Office GUI. Actually, the resemblance is so similar and there are so many mentions and logos of "Microsoft Word" on the site, they must have some sort of agreement with Micro$oft. Either way, their Office Online product runs completely in a Java applet and lets you work cross-O/S (Windows, Linux, OSX) in Office 2003 formats. They have a pop-up warning that they’re not compatible with Linux and Mac yet, but the applet ran fine for me in Firefox running in (Ubuntu) Linux (screenshot below). They give you a free account with 30MB of space to try-out while they try to convince you to buy their offline product 
Whereas Writely was more focussed on group editing of a document, ThinkFree is merely trying to be a Microsoft Office substitute. Not a bad idea though, at least until Open Office hits 3.0 and inherits the world
Think you can’t open Office documents without paying hundreds of dollars for software? Think again. Just visit ThinkFree Office Online and you can open, edit, and create Office documents with this easy and convenient online service, new from ThinkFree.
November 19th, 2008
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