Microsoft Prepping Browser-based Word and Excel

JCWDenton writes "In a bid to spin its web-based version of Office into contention with rival internet behemoth Google, Microsoft has said it will begin accepting applications for beta testing its web apps later this year. There is one significant difference, however: unlike Google apps, Microsoft said users of its new service can only create or edit online documents if they have Office software already installed on their machines. Microsoft said features of its Office Live Workspace would include allowing users to upload more than 1,000 documents to free personal websites."

Comments

What's the point?

[k_187]

If you have to have office installed, why bother with the online version? I could see them requiring office to register for an account. But why bother?

Re:What's the point?

[suv4x4]

If you have to have office installed, why bother with the online version? I could see them requiring office to register for an account. But why bother?

There is no point. You need to see Microsoft thinks in multiple steps, and this is just step 1.

Step 1 is about rolling out a beta of this software, and allow the public to test it, give feedback, and their devs to improve on that.

The fact they offer it only to existing customers means there's no chance that this may hurt their Office sales. And it also lets the world know that Microsoft is "aware" of competing web products, such as Google's.

Should things get rough (Step 2), Microsoft already will have a mature web product in their hands, it will have people familiar with working with this product, and have the option of changing how to offer it, including separately for an yearly fee, as Google does.

It's the benefit of having so much money, you can throw them in all directions and use what "sticks".

Re:What's the point?

[ThirdPrize]

Just read the articles and it doesn't bear much similarity to the summary Taco posted. There is a M$ press release that describes a off-site document hosting set up. As long as you have Office installed on a machine you can download/edit/review documents from the server anywhere in the world. Not really comparable to Googles offerings.

Anywhere..

[Travis Mansbridge]

Now you can use our software anywhere. As long as that software is already there.

Why the web?

[Shadow Wrought]

Because math errors on the desktop are so confining.

Already have Office installed

[christurkel]

And will work only Internet Explorer, let me guess. This is will be competition, how?

Pros and Cons

[thatskinnyguy]

Pros:

• Updated versions constantly
• Access from anywhere the tubes go.
• Ease of sharing documents.

Cons:

• DoS attack at Microsoft could mean loss of revenues for companies using this service
• I never have experienced any "outages" of Office installed on my desktop. Have you?
• Do you really own anything but your user name for this service? How expensive is a user name going to be?

Why office should be installed in the machine?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Are they trying to share DLLs between installed MS-Office software and the Web based spreadsheet and word tools? Given their track record this is typically the kind of thing they will do. They preload MS-Office DLLs during boot to create the impression of instant-on MS-Office compared to OpenOffice. (They don't have try this hard to beat OpenOffice in launch time, but that is a different issue). They might tunnel behind the browser and security and everything so that the web based tool can give you faster response time. They don't have to stream in code to execute in the browser and they don't have to send changes back to the server to rerender the page being edited.

I could easily imagine a development team pitching this idea to the pointy haired bosses. "We have this huge installed base of DLLs and megabytes of code already in the client's machine. We beat them in the download time! We execute complex code in their machine, we beat Google in refresh time! yay!! yay!!!" Of course, such a thing would violate all security protocols, and create thousands of security holes, but they won't care. It would not work in any platform other than Windows and they won't care. It might not work in FireFox and they would go, "yeah! that will kill FF"

Anyway this is all speculation, but I don't see why they would demand pre installed Ms-Office to allow a web based tool to work.

Bill Gates quoted as saying

[Tejin]

"That's the stupidest fucking thing I've heard since I've been at Microsoft!"