Writely

» see writely.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

writely came out in august 2005 with a wordmark that looked like a fountain-pen logo and a promise that you could edit a document in a browser tab without opening word. it was made by three programmers at a company called upstartle: sam schillace, steve newman, and claudia carpenter. the three had been playing with a new browser feature called contenteditable and a new pattern people were starting to call ajax. writely was what fell out of that experiment.

the first time i saw a demo of writely was on a tech blog i was reading in late 2005. i was in my second year of computer engineering at university in ankara, on ttnet dsl at home, still doing most of my writing in microsoft word. writely did not look like a serious replacement for word. it looked like a proof of concept that browsers could carry real editors. that was the interesting part. the pattern was going to matter more than the product.

by the time google bought upstartle on 9 march 2006, writely had somewhere around 500,000 registered users. the deal price was never announced but the reporting at the time put it around ten million dollars. the three founders and the small team moved to google. writely stayed online for about seven more months while google integrated it, then relaunched on 10 october 2006 as google docs and spreadsheets, alongside a separately-built spreadsheet product google had also been working on.

~ the case file ~

~ the rebrand ~

the writely brand ended on the same day google docs launched. the domain kept working as a redirect. users who signed up under writely got moved into the docs account structure. the ui got softened toward google's visual style, but the underlying editor was still the writely codebase, and it stayed that way for years. sam schillace ended up running the google docs team for a while, then left in 2010 for box.

this is a rebrand more than a shutdown, but that is often how a product dies for real. once the name goes and the founders leave, the thing that got acquired is not what launched anymore. google docs became its own product. the writely-shaped early web word processor got remembered by a small circle of people who tried it in 2005 and 2006, and forgotten by everyone else.

~ what it proved ~

writely was one of the first web apps that made a category of desktop software feel replaceable. it was not the only one working in this space. zoho writer, ajaxwrite, thinkfree office were all somewhere in the same window, and adobe launched buzzword a year later. what writely had was the earliest working demo that stuck around long enough to attract a big-company acquirer and become the default in that category. once google shipped docs, the wider web-office idea stopped being a demo and started being infrastructure.

the technical part that made writely possible was thin. contenteditable was a microsoft ie feature that had been in the browser since about 1999, mostly unused, until firefox picked it up and ajax made round-trip saves cheap. what changed in 2005 was that the pattern finally worked reliably enough for a real editor. writely happened to be the team that noticed and shipped it.

~ what got buried ~

what got buried was upstartle as a company. the three founders became google employees, and the small independent web-office startup category folded into either google or later microsoft's own web office. writely-the-brand died at fourteen months old. writely-the-product survived as google docs for two decades and counting. that is a happier ending than most graves on this site. the ending is still an ending.

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