Software’s Year in Review

What would December be without “Year in Review”? ReadWriteWeb recently published their year in review chronicling what major software companies have done in the year of 2007. Here is a brief summary of what the players in the enterprise software industry are doing. For a more in depth view, read the article.

The biggest change of the year according to them was Google Apps. And the biggest disappointment was the lack of reaction from Microsoft. They’ve not done anything to show that they are reacting to the major movements in Enterprise 2.0.

Now a summary of what everyone’s been doing this year! Google acquired several platforms that they will use to redesign Google Docs. The only flaw that ReadWriteWeb sees is that they had no presentation software, but it was fixed when Google introduced a platform in September. Another attempt that surprised the market was when they teamed up with Gem Capitol to further push their software in corporations. Microsoft promptly released a 10-point list that listed reasons not to use Google Docs. Zimbra also released a statement attacking them. To further Google’s innovation in the Enterprise 2.0 category, there have been rumors of the past few months that they would release a corporate wiki application, but nothing has come out yet.

Now onto Microsoft! As stated earlier, they have done nothing huge publically this year when it comes to their applications and making them Web 2.0 friendly. In October, they did announced Office Live Workspace and Office Live was renamed to Office Live: Small Business. They also partnered with Atlassian and Newsgroup to make Sharepoint more Web 2.0 friendly.

Zimbra was purchased by Yahoo! For $350 million in September.

Zoho filled their year with steady updates to improve their Web 2.0 capabilities.

ThinkFree announced in August that they hosted one million documents and had over 335,000 users.

The company that is gaining the most traction is Dark Horse. They are an online IM club that announced a platform that has potential for web office applications.

Finally, as always, we look foreword to next year. ReadWrite sees Google Apps maturing into a more functional site that will be enterprise oriented. There is lots of high potential for next year to include lots of partnerships and acquisitions for the smaller companies that are expanding in the Enterprise/Web 2.0 world. However, the most interesting thing everybody should look out for is how Microsoft to the new online document capabilities of the internet.