The Mark of Zoho

I'm a Mac girl. I've been a Mac girl for about as long as I can remember. There may have been dalliances, flirtations, but I was in love at the sight of my first Apple IIGS. I invented games and quizzes in BASIC, and then we got an LC III and the wonder of Sierra games like Space Quest (oh, Roger Wilco), Police Quest (which I believe taught me poker) and The Black Cauldron (which is totally the best thing that ever happened to a giant floppy disc) hooked me. The Apple Operating System became second nature to me as I spent hours in my basement, happy as a clam.

The thing that started to bug me as the world became more and more Microsoft-reliant was that a lot of the really good games didn't come for Mac. This gradually translated into a grownup problem: Due to the nefarious plot that resulted in the inclusion of Microsoft Office software on practically every PC sold from the 1990s onward, I needed to purchase Microsoft Office just to interact with much of the outside world.

Google Docs helped me out significantly in reading outsider PC files (bye bye, Microsoft Excel from 1998 ... SECURE EMPTY TRASH), but it can't do everything.

Now there's Zoho!

Check it out, people. You can already sign into Zoho if you have a Google or Yahoo account, and they have online software from word processors to databases, presentation tools to Web conferencing tools. Best of all, you can use it to quickly view Office documents without distorting their formatting.

Even if you do have Microsoft Word, or PowerPoint, or whatever, it can be a pain to open it up to read a file. You can save time and mouse-twirling by using an online system like Zoho. And unless you need a ton of storage space, it's free!

It may seem futuristic and weird, but eventually, all software will probably be online. It's just the next step after throwing out all our floppies. It's similar to the way On Demand and Netflix may soon make DVD players obsolete — and just imagine how fast your computer would run if you didn't have your hard drive bunged up with a million programs.

They're making more tools and gadgets all the time — browser plugins, file sharing ... and just check out some of their awards!

People are catching on. Zoho was recently featured in the New York Times, as well as Time Magazine, The Economist, and CIO.

Made on a Mac.