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.
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.
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.
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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.