When asked if and how they plan to match Microsoft Office’s unparalleled feature set, most online office suite vendors simply switch the subject, touting the superiority of their Web-based collaboration, and low or free price.

ZoooS LLC is one of the few vendors that won’t dodge the question.

At the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, the California-European startup will preview a Web office suite that is based on the free, open-source OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office’s main desktop competitor.

ZoooS offers Google Docs-like collaboration, such as letting users simultaneously edit the same document. And despite OpenOffice’s size — version 2 for Windows requires 440 MB of disk space when installed — ZoooS offers speedy access to 95% of the features and look-and-feel of OpenOffice.org, said ZoooS’ CEO and co-founder, Hisham El-Emam.

“It’s almost all Javascript, so it runs really fast, you don’t even need Google Chrome,” El-Emam said.

ZoooS already has a “few thousand” paying users at several medium-sized companies and its major client, the German Ministry of Education, making the 20-employee startup already profitable, El-Emam said. The basic cost is $999 for a perpetual server license for 10 users, which includes installation support and a few basic support incidents after that. The price per user decreases as the number of users increases, he said.

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