Kudos go to our friends at Zoho for standing up to Microsoft with style, humor and chutzpah! Responding to a comment from Microsoft that Zoho and other cloud-based office productivity applications offered “fake Office capabilities,” Zoho seized the gorilla by the…um…horns, and quickly launched www.fakeoffice.org.

This decisive marketing coup was accompanied by a well-produced video and I’m looking forward to seeing some of the additional mileage that Zoho gets from Microsoft’s latest gaff.

It’s also amusing to think about Microsoft’s own “fake” efforts. How about the fake iPod (Zune) and the fake PlayStation (Xbox)? Now, of course, there is the fake search engine. One could also argue that Excel was the fake Lotus 123 in it’s day, and Word was the fake Wordperfect. And dare we say that Internet Explorer was also the fake Netscape? We could play this game for a long time given that the basic premise for office productivity tools has been around for a long time and there have been generations of them by now (anyone remember Harvard Graphics?!)

I hope that some similarly creative folks out there will make the most of this opportunity. Although Microsoft is incredibly easy to ridicule, it’s certainly more fun when they set themselves up for it so adroitly. Do let me know if you’ve managed to join in the fun!

P.S. KnowledgeTree's Software as a Service offering, KnowledgeTreeLive, integrates very nicely with Zoho Office, providing customers with web-based editing of documents in the KnowledgeTree repository.

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