Despite demand And when interest in Web-based Office-like suites finally caught up to ThinkFree, other competitors such as Google Docs and seemed to jump ahead, promising more and a big brand name (in Google's case) or a (in Zoho's).

Quiet for the past year during a reorganization that saw founder and long-time CEO T.J. Kang depart, ThinkFree announced a new product on Tuesday that it hopes will jump start its flagging chances.

ThinkFree NetBook is a trimmed-down version of its desktop office suite. It takes up just 70MB when installed, not including the 70 MB Java 6 plug-in it depends on to run, Edward Coloma, managing director, said in an interview last week. That allows it to run as fast as the larger version of ThinkFree for regular PCs, he said.

Microsoft Office 2007 takes up 1.5GB of disk space, though some of that can be freed up by deleting the original download package. For its size and licensing cost, few Netbooks are using Microsoft Office, according to Brad Linder, who tracks them in his

Instead, Linder said, many have turned to , such as Asus's market-leading Eee, Dell Inc.'s Inspiron Mini 9, and others.