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They're using "Office" to refer to "Microsoft Office": what they're offering is an Office plugin that allows you to store and share your doucments online.

I'm sure MS is working on their version of MSOO (Microsoft Office Online)

Have you seen the Live Documents site? I assume that some of that $400 million for Hotmail was spent on legal consultation for this Live Documents baby. I'm no lawyer, and I certainly wouldn't be throwing around registered trademarks without some seriously qualified legal advice the way it's happening on this site. Add to this the claim (to be seen) that Live Documents will mimic the MS Office interface and it's clear that Mr. Bhatia is desperately waving his arms in the general direction of MS and saying either (a)"Hey, screw you and your $400 office suite", or (b)"Hey, look, I just saved you a lot of work designing your online office suite". Or possibly (c)both.

And power to him. As was pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, MS helped lay the legal foundation for the borrowed interface; let them lie in the bed they've made.

Personally I have no love for Google's version of the online office. I've used their spreadsheets for collaboration and found them painfully slow and inferior to the good old-fashioned local office suite. I'll try Live Documents just out of curiosity, but even if it's quick and great and functional, unless it's functional beyond my wildest dreams I just don't see any compelling reason to trust my files with a third party. And don't talk to me about the money I can save in licensing fees -- most slashdotters already have some great workaround to that problem already figured out.

db

Methinks that's a bit of Indian understatement at work there. :-)

Why do I say this? Consider the About Us page:

InstaColl is a Bangalore-based start-up founded with a singular vision - establish the first "Made by India" product brand that is globally recognized and appreciated. Please note that is "Made by India" and not just "Made in India" - half the software products in the world are probably already developed to some extent in India but can you name even one product brand made by India...no? We thought so - this is therefore our raison d[']être...

Confusing run-ons notwithstanding (and in fact, I would disagree, unless they specifically meant Web2.0-isque products), there's a bit of a ra-ra-India chest-beating going on out here. You then have that sentiment followed by this gem of a sentence:

InstaColl was founded by a bunch of average-Joe technologists aided and abetted by the favorite poster boy of Indian IT .

Note three points here:-
a) "Favorite" not 'favourite' : These guys are thinking "global", which apparently, is en-US.
b) AND YET, you have that very superfluous, Indian construct, "of the". In a different place and dialect, that sentence would have, probably, read as "Indian IT's favourite poster-boy" or something; it is a very very Indian habit to convert adjectives into nouns with an "of the" construct.
c) You usually aid and abet someone in crime, not to fund a start-up. While, of course, they might have used the phrase tongues firmly in cheek, long experience in editting such documents tells me that they, perhaps, didn't think about it too much. The idiom hits the general spot they were aiming for; so they didn't quite think about, well, not using it. Again, this is usually a result of reading English more than you speak; truth be told, I'm also occassionally guilty of doing that. [As also use more c's and s's than necessary at times ;-)]

In addition to using quaint phrases, and wrong idiomatic usage, (traditional) written Indian-English is also quite understated; for the line you quoted, you could easily imagine the copy-writer thinking about writing, "More Powerful than Office!" but then telling herself that she's probably better off saying, it matches Office 2007. This is a common pattern in Indian-English; here's an article where the author hints at that understatement ("self-important colonials ... decreed that when an exalted civil servant says "may," trembling lesser breeds should hear "shall."")

Another article making a similar point:

[A] recent book, "Indlish", ... notes that: "Indian English suffers from flatulent orotundity, a form of high-flown language that tries to impress but instead obscures." This style of speaking and writing, the book argues, is a hangover from the Raj and the bureaucratic officialese that it bequeathed to India.

Favorites or not, you get this distinct impression of a previous generation's "good-name" Ind-glish is struggling to come out into a globalized world here.

Then:
Sign up to get invited

Live Documents is currently available in a technology preview mode on an on-invitation basis. To request an invite to this private beta, please sign up below.

Try here http://www.live-documents.com/products/how.html

There seem to be a number of comments made by people based entirely on presuppositions. I know we're not supposed to RTFA, but you could at least look at the website before *flame on*

Is here
See for yourself.

I'm not surprised a Slashdot summary didn't link to it, but the Times Online? Come now.

Here it is: the Live Documents website.

Not had a look yet, though as I've only found a limited use for Google Documents (the spreadsheet application is great for collaboration) I doubt it will be of any use to me. Open Office is good enough for me, if not everyone.