I previously used the term “gOffice” to refer to the coming critical mass of collaborative productivity tools over at Google. But I’m informed there’s already a gOffice. And man are they some evil bastards…

This is one of the most obvious fishing expeditions for a corporate buyout I’ve ever seen. Yahoo almost bought them and then… Gee (as in “G”), I wonder what happened. It doesn’t help/hurt that they throw in a nice dose of domain squatting. I mean gOffice? That was accidental, I’m sure.

Um, half the site still says it’s free, and yet I can’t even see what the thing does without signing up and handing over all my personal and credit card information. Fat chance. Wait, and they want my “secret phrase” as well? Is this a phishing site too? Jesus.

Holy crap, this site has one of the worst and most abusive terms of use agreements imaginable. It’s worded so broadly that you basically sign over all rights to anything you produce using these tools. Don’t believe me? Check this out: “No part of any content, form or document may be reproduced in any form or incorporated into any information retrieval system, electronic or mechanical, other than for your personal use (but not for resale or redistribution).” Which means, if you write a novel on this thing, forget about ever getting it published (gOffice probably would be able to though).

Once you click on the register link, you’re stuck in SSL mode, so you get a security warning on every… single… page. How ironic.

There is something subtly so condescending about the whole thing. I mean even beyond the whole “pay for our product before you even glance at it” aspect. It could just be that weird abruptness that comes from being a technical person (or in this case I suspect, a lawyer) for whom English is a second language (and jargon may well be the first). Then again, it could be this enterprise really is this full of itself. “We suggest you go buy an inkjet printer if you currently own a laser.” Oh yeah? Well I suggest you go fuck yourself, gOffice!

Okay, maybe it’s not so subtle. These guys are just evil, evil bastards: “This site is all but impossible to legally duplicate, as we have filed a broad patent application that seeks to lock up the interplay of technologies we use in a unique and unobvious way.” And they’re proud of this. Have they seen Writely, Google Spreadsheets, etc.? I hope Google sues these guys out of existence, finds out where they live, ties them down to their beds with barbed wire, whips them bloody with strips cut from steel-belted radial tires, burns their houses down with them inside, sends Carrot Top to the funeral to roast the deceased (badly) in front of their unsuspecting families, and then a few days later exhumes their graves for the singular purpose of taking a shit on their corpses.