Microsoft Faces Fight Against Online Office Rival

bharatm writes "It's now been a decade since Microsoft bought Hotmail, the web-based e-mail service, for about $400 million. Now Sabeer Bhatia (the site's co-founder) is challenging the software giant's core $20 billion office desktop business. Yesterday Sabeer Bhatia released a free online rival to the bestselling Office suite of applications that will allow users to view, share and edit documents from any computer. 'Designed to help consumers avoid expensive upgrades and to foster collaboration on a secure internet platform, Live Documents matches features found in Office 2007, the most recent version. It will be given away to individuals with 100MB of free data storage space per user. Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft's licensed technology.'"

Comments

Office Live Documents? Hmm...

[Jugalator]

Office Live Documents, also not falling under the trademark name exception where he's using the naming in a different field of business? Should be interesting to see what Microsoft's reaction will be here, if they see it's enough of a threat here to have their lawyers attack him. It's not identical by sharing the Windows Live part of Windows Live, but it looks quite intentionally used to sound confusingly similar to a Microsoft product to me.

Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm...

[Stevecrox]

Yes but when you download Open Office or install star office the look and feel is subtley different they have their own logo's and design. If you goto the live document site you will slight alterations of the standard MS Office icons, you'll see the MS Office logo on the front page and a snapshot of what looks to be MS Office 2003. The site appears to be trying to pretend to be Microsoft sanctioned and be part of Microsoft.

I always thought trademarks were designed to protect companies/consumers when small companies stole names, designs and images from anouther and mislead consumers into buying their product. This would seem like an open and shut case of a website trying to pretend it has Microsoft Office and mislead people into using it for that reason. If they want to tout how the apps looks extremely similar to MS Office let them but lets not use identical images and icons.

One thing missing...

[Sirch]

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.

Re:Yeah, forget it

[JMZero]

The company I work for has been using all online docs for the last 7 years. Around 4 million documents and a few hundred thousand dollars saved later, I don't think it's that ridiculous of an idea.

About a year in, we added a plug-in to store backup versions of the docs on the user's hard disk to supplement the auto-save (in the case of a lost connection during editing, which of course does happen occasionally) - but other than that things have pretty much "just worked". Honestly, the docs have caused less problems than we used to have with Word: there's nothing to configure incorrectly, there's no choice about where to save, there's nothing to install, and there's far fewer features to abuse. It's much easier to protect the user from themselves and to enforce business rules in documents. As a bonus, users can work from home without buying their own software, or having compatibility hassles.

Pretty much everything our users do is done using a browser and hosted centrally; it has been an unqualified success and an IT dream. I can't imagine how much pain we've avoided by missing 5 generations of new Word problems. I think back to the time when we had to install apps on every machine, and I shudder.

Re:Yeah, forget it

[JMZero]

Our document editor is homegrown, and we host it internally. Privacy and security would certainly be bigger concerns if you were hosting with a third party, and I can't really speak to how it would be best to manage that.

The application isn't overly bandwidth intensive, and some of our users access it over cell-type connections. But really this hasn't impacted us too much - the nature of our business means that our production staff who travel will usually be dictating rather than typing themselves (and it's easy to upload the dictation files when you're back to some kind of good connection). Also, to be fair, many of our users (especially marketing) have other Word processors they use for documents not tied to production, like proposals or brochures or labels and what not. Our app is not a general purpose word processor: we had the luxury of designing it around a limited set of needs.

In terms of business rules, we've found it to be very convenient - though a proper content management system would do most of the same things. Naturally it's easy to control who can see what, who can edit what, what's available to what clients online, etc. We can also make certain elements of documents uneditable, or only editable via our own tools (and the relevant data captured back). For example: our users produce a lot of reports, and in the past they would tend to put tabled information in reports and nowhere else (meaning we couldn't analyze that data later). Now, they enter that data one time, in a structured way through a plugin in the word processor, and it's persisted in the database as well as being on the report. This is of course possible with a regular word processor as well, but I think some parts would be much more difficult to manage. When you're dealing with a small subset of word processing functionality, and a small/standard codebase for the UI, many of these things are trivial.

I imagine there are a lot better options out there now than when we built this years ago (and it quite possibly wouldn't be the right choice now) but it has worked out well for us.