Imaginative young web entrepreneurs are great at coming up with completely new ideas. Taking an existing idea and improving upon it is a much more daunting task - especially when the leader in your area happens to be that lumbering behemoth of computer programs, Microsoft Word. But anybody who's ever been annoyed by Word's pop-up cartoon paperclip icons will already know that Bill Gates doesn't do everything perfectly. And Sam Schillace figured he could do better.
Writely, the application he co-created, is a collaborative word processor (it's now known as Google Docs, since being acquired by another hi-tech behemoth for the rumoured bargain price of $2m). It lives on the web, not on your computer desktop; you access it through your browser and save documents not to your hard disk but somewhere on the internet. That means you can edit a document from a computer in the office, then from a laptop, then from one at home - and, more interestingly, that several different people can edit the same document from wherever they are. That might be a company report or a jointly authored academic paper; or it might just as easily be a volunteering rota for an after-school club, the kind of thing for which Schillace, who has a five-year-old son, finds himself using his own software.
'Word processors today were invented 20 years ago, when the endpoint of the document was usually print, so they were very focused in that direction,' Schillace says. 'But nowadays the endpoint of a document is usually communicating [online]: you're posting to a blog or a website, or you're emailing a document around.' Microsoft Word still boasts a lot of features that Google Docs doesn't. But 'feature bloat' is something the Web 2.0 crowd see as a pitfall.
What is Web 2.0? The one thread that all these companies have in common is the idea that the web is really coming into its own as a platform, a tools platform, an application platform, an infrastructure and an ecosystem. A lot of these companies wouldn't make sense if there weren't a lot of people who found it natural to spend a lot of their time doing things on the internet.
What is your big idea?
A collaborative word processor. We set out to provide a useful tool ... it was just a fresh way to look at this space. Being able to work together, communicate and collaborate in a very natural, web-centred way.
What's the next big thing?
Once we all take for granted that we live on the internet, and all of our applications are on the internet - once we get to that point, the way we now all assume that everybody is connected to the internet ... new things will emerge. We'll figure it out in five years. We're busy doing this one now. I don't know - I'm not that much of a visionary.