Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Especially since they're using the actual MS Office logo right on the home page...
They may be ready to challenge the validity of Microsoft's claim to Office by itself as a trademark. While there is no question that Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows, etc. are valid trademarks, the validity of Office, Word, Windows etc. is questionable since these are arguably generic terms that Microsoft cannot remove from the public domain. There are quite a few other office suites with Office as part of their name, e.g. KOffice, Gnome Office, Xoom Office, Star Office.
...when it was called ThinkFree Office.
and from the article..Don't want that cheap knockoff now do we..Yes it's better quality because it looks exactly like the most complained about office package due to its usability issues.
I wouldn't think of using Google Docs as my full time editor. What I have found it very handy for is storing frequently used documents in a fashion which I can reach just about anywhere and export as PDF, Doc or ODF depending on my needs. In a pinch, I can use it for writing, and then move it to my main document store.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually, Lindows won on the trademark issue, in the United States. See the Wikipedia article on Lindows. Microsoft finally offered to settle, and the Lindows people agreed since Microsoft had sued them in six countries and dealing with all the suits was such a hassle.
The fact that numerous other office suites with office in their name exist is pretty good evidence that Microsoft can't claim a valid trademark.
Frankly, if it makes sense, why not?
They did it that way back then because computers were obscenely expensive and rare.
Now they're plentiful and cheap, but expensive to administer effectively... there's still an economy of scale there, especially for smaller businesses.
Would you mind sharing what online application you are actually using? How do you deal with travelling users who may/may not have constant Internet access? What about privacy/security? Are the docs encrypted? Is this an inhouse system or provided by a third party (eg Google)? How are business rules enforced?
If you look at the Office Live Documents website, you'll see they use icons that resemble those of Microsoft Office.
They are, I think, doing this on purpose, hoping for the publicity from being sued by MS. They are probably gambling on the fact that the money they might lose would be less than what an equivalent marketing campaign would buy them. Besides, they might pull back and "oblige" before it's too late, complying to MS' demand to change their name. By then, everybody + dog will know about the service.
If this is what they try to achieve, the idea is, basically, brilliant.
Please look at the Office Live Doc website and count the similarities with MS Office you see. There's even a logo that looks like the MS Office logo!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
From the site: "Live Documents provides you with a full Office productivity suite - Word, Excel and PowerPoint - with built-in collaboration features right out of your browser - no more dependence on Microsoft Office and Windows and no more format lock-in!" So there is a full office suite online. It also sounds like the online suite might be using the names "Word", "Excel", and "Powerpoint". That is a problem.
However they also have a Microsoft office add-in that more or less allows one to use Microsoft Office as an offline non-browser client. In fact, it looks like they intend this to be the usual way to edit documents, using the online editors only when Microsoft office is not available.
Their site does definitely use too many copies of the Microsoft office logo, and the Microsoft Office screen shots are somewhat misleading, especially as there very few screen shots of the browser-based editor.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
The key seller for Office, in business, is Word + Excel and Outlook + Exchange. The key seller for Excel, is VBA. Whether you like it or not, the vast majority of businesses with more than a few people use Excel and VBA Macros. The company I work at provides a large scale financial solution to people and we have hundreds of client businesses. All of them use VBA Macros. Sadly, I spend a large amount of each day modifying them to suit their latest requests.
Does Google Apps offer VBA or something like it? Does Live Documents? Does OpenOffice? I'm pretty sure they don't (but admit to being too lazy to fact check this).
So it's game-over for businesses. Have fun with the Mums and Dads and teenagers but they're never going to pay you more than a few peanuts. Until you can match VBA in applications, MSO wins.
He was lucky with Hotmail to have had a very creative and clueful partner. There's nothing original with this site and this will fail along with Sabeer's other companies in his post-Hotmail days. I've very happy to not have to deal with Sabeer's ego on a daily basis anymore.
Is is just me or we're slowly going back to square one? That is, to the days when all you had was a terminal connected to a time sharing system you paid to rent resources from?
It's just you. We aren't heading back to "square one" - the world where you had a terminal connected to a time-sharing system you paid to rent resources from. But that original world still exists, and in certain situations, still makes lots of sense.
1) Accessing applications online with vendors on their systems means that support costs are dramatically reduced - since the vendor controls the ultimate application execution environment, the possibility of conflicts with strange situations and other software is reduced to near zero.
2) The "time sharing" system called "slashdot.org" is what you typed your post into. So is "http://maps.google.com". Are you moving "backward" by posting? In other words, it's not a step "backwards", but it might be a step "towards".
3) Your browser isn't a dumb terminal. You can "do it yourself" if you can do a better job. But if you can't, and the remote application provider can, you'll lose. Get used to it... it's called competition.
If you want to *own* it, you better have it to begin with. Until then, find somebody who has what you need and pay them. Even when you "buy" software, it's only good for a while until the O/S updates and your version is no longer usable/compatable.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.