14 DAY TRIAL // Google Docs has been synonymous with the editors, the document editor in particular. It has always been Google's answer to Microsoft's Office suite. But a couple of years ago, Docs became about more than that, it added support for any type of files, even those that could not be edited with native tools.
Google also allowed developers access to Docs via powerful APIs. Still, the native editors were the stars of the shows. With Google Drive's introduction, that is slowly changing. Now, Docs is just a set of apps on top of the Drive infrastructure.
The change in perspective isn't complete yet, but that's where Google is going. So the fact that there is another complete suite of editors available in Google Drive and that it isn't Google's shouldn't be much of a surprise.
Zoho has been around for several years and has been a competitor to Google Docs. But with the Google Drive SDK making it possible to use the cloud infrastructure to store any type of data, the Zoho team went about integrating the Zoho suite into Drive.
It only took a few weeks too and now the Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show are all available to Drive users. Existing users of these tools now also have the possibility of saving files in Drive.
"We have many Google and Google Apps customers using Zoho applications through Google Apps Marketplace, Google Chrome Webstore or directly using 'Sign in using Google' on our login page," Zoho's Naveen Venkat wrote.
"Tightly integrating Zoho's applications with Google's services is very crucial for us. During the launch of Google Drive, Google announced the availability of a SDK and the related Google Drive APIs that would facilitate third party apps to integrate with the service," he explained.
The end result is that all three office apps are now available as alternatives to the Docs ones. If you're a Drive user or a Google user in general, you'll be able to keep all of your files in one place and still use the third-party tools.
