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

Re:Yeah, forget it

[The_reformant]

For many common day-to-day operations the loss of flexibility isnt worth it imho, many operations are inherently cpu intensive, global regex search and replace on large groups of large files for instance. I could see this bringing a server to its knees pretty quickly if enough users were doing enough complex operations.

What about large files? I often have need to edit text files in the order of hundreds of gigabytes. Some of these come from customers across the atlantic. Moving gigs of data across the trans atlantic pipes every time you autosave is going to add up for any business.

1 hour network outage on a site with 500 employees, you just lost 500 people hours.

The list goes on...