Ajax13 joins the field of online office suites, including a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, presentation software, and music player and manager.

I gave it a three-minute test drive, spending most of that time in the word processor, and here's what stands out: It's designed to look like Microsoft Word, loads in six seconds, opens and edits .doc files, runs in any operating system, and it's small, under 400K, so it runs fast even on slower computers.

The software runs in Firefox but apparently not Internet Explorer -- if that's the case, that's going to limit market share for Ajax13; nearly 90% of the world is still using Internet Explorer, with only 10+% using Firefox. I suspect this may be an intentional strategy by Ajax13 to manage growth by keeping demand low, and that they might have IE support planned for further down the road.

The suite saves files locally on your computer. That particular feature is appealing to me (or would be, if I didn't already have Microsoft Office); I'm old-fashioned enough that I don't quite trust storing my precious data on a server that I don't control, run by a company that I first heard about 15 minutes ago, located somewhere out in the series of tubes that are the interweebs.

I don't actually know this for a fact, but I suspect that Ajax is somehow involved in this software. I'm a trained tech journalist; I can sniff out these things.

Orli Yakuel has more info. The company behind Ajax13 appears to be affiliated with Michael Robertson,, the troublemaker entrepreneur behind Linspire and the old MP3.com.

Via Digg