WideWord the accidental enterprise web app

It’s funny how things turn out. I designed WideWord as a collaborative tool for small business. It was essentially based on my frustration of sending word documents back and forth between people while working on business plans and other collaborative documents.

There are lots of web based word processors out there and WideWord never became as big as I wanted it to. Writely is probably the most famous of my competitors and has now as everyone knows been bought by Google.

However it turns out as I have discovered from the active users that I do have of WideWord that it and it’s sister service WideBlog actually have most of their users within large companies and government projects. I don’t normally pry in what people are using it for, but a couple of users have told me that they use it mainly for multi company projects, where they can’t use their intranets.

Many of them consider it more secure than other offerings and while I don’t think anyone has gone and had WideWord certified by their corporate security departments, they feel they can trust it more than say google hosted projects due to it’s strong encryption. One Belgian government user told me they had problems sending word files back and forth due to anti virus filters and used WideWord out of necessity as it was the solution that was least likely to get him trouble with his IT department.

I never in my wildest dreams figured that enterprise users would end up using WideWord, but that just goes to show that markets somehow have a way of sneaking up on you. Now to figure out a way of monetizing this market.