The writewith blog.

The concept of putting office software online is not new — being more connected would clearly help organizations become more efficient. But the general population is just starting to use the web for work. Approximately 450 million people around the world are still using Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.).

Software companies of all sizes, and from all sorts of backgrounds, are aiming at the desktop office — especially, it seems, because the online land grab seems to have already taken place in social networking, social news, photo sharing, etc….

These fields are green but there are fences in the way that weren’t there for, say, Digg. Here’s one: bloated enterprise software vendors have their products and services (and sales teams) firmly entrenched within companies (that’s how they get away with charging so much).

We think that one of the big problems with office software and enterprise software in general is that features are designed based on a feature list compiled from many different people — the original vision of the product becomes muddled by feature-creep, and it ends up hard to use.

We don’t care (too much) about the bajillion features in Microsoft Word — we’re laser-focused on how people actually write together. Based on our experiences building online newsrooms for college newspapers, we decided to launch with the minimum number of features necessary.

And that’s how we’re climbing over the fences.