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...

[belmolis]

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.

Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm...

[willyhill]

They are valid, I think, in context. "Office" in the context of a software productivity suite can probably be upheld. I don't see "Joe's Office" in Detroit selling printer consumables being a threat to the trademark. "Office Online", a software productivity suite, might.

There's a brand of kitchen towels in Brazil I think called "Linux". Has the entity that protects the Linux trademark gone after them? No. Would they go after ReactOS if they decided to re-brand themselves and sell their wares under the "Linux" name? Probably.

As far as the courts are concerned, it's all about context. That's why "Lindows" got nailed. If they were selling Pokemon stickers Microsoft probably wouldn't have bothered, don't you think?

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.

Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm...

[belmolis]

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.

Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm...

[Herschel Cohen]

" ... thought trademarks were designed to protect companies/consumers when small companies stole names, ... Maybe, but the inverse is NOT true. For example, Vista was a Veterans Administration application before it became Vista the OS, the former was open source too. In addition, I read a long description on how MS pilfered the Internet Explorer browser name. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate a link, it was quite a story where justice did not triumph. Others big names have freely used other's property that were not freely given, until they were forced to pay. Many times having the larger legal budget spared them of even that consequence.

Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm...

[Tacvek]

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.

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:One thing missing...

[ColdWetDog]

Windows only. No OS X. No Linux. No wireless.

Lame.

And how is that different from Google Docs?

[vivaoporto]

And how is that different from Google Docs? TFA even mentions that it is getting a "Crowded office", with all these wannabe "online" office applications. This is nothing but a press release, a slashvertisement for a product that did not even proved its worth yet.

Nothing to see here, move along people.

Re:And how is that different from Google Docs?

[RealGrouchy]

And how is that different from Google Docs? Because this one has all the stability and file integrity of Microsoft Office, with the security and trust of an unknown company on the Internet?

- RG>

Yeah, forget it

[realmolo]

"It will be given away to individuals with 100MB of free data storage space per user."

That's pretty cool.

"Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft's licensed technology."

Okay, that's fucking stupid.

Office apps that REQUIRE a working network/internet connection to function are something that any sane IT department would stay FAR FAR away from. We just don't live in a world where everyone can be connected to the internet all of the time. And even when that day comes, most people would like to have their apps run locally, just in case.

The whole idea of "hosted desktop apps" is dubious (and I'm not even considering the inevitable "rental fees", which is a whole 'nuther scam). It might work for little "one-time use" stuff, but no one would ever rely on them for day-to-day work.

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.

Anouther Web Application Oh Good

[Stevecrox]

When will people realise that not everything that can be done online should be done online. The article is very light on details one of the big reasons I won't even try Google Apps is because all the files are located on Googles servers and I wouldn't have any control over them. The only detail the article does mention is that this "Live" office has Office 2003's look and feel. OpenOffice is free and has Office 2003's "look" and yet it hasn't replaced MS Office, google apps is free and hasn't replaced MS Office.

Next a small upstart company will be telling us how they have a image manipulation program you uses through the web which will replace photoshop.

The Truman Show

[iamacat]

Did we really progress from naked MySpace photos to such a disregard to our own privacy that we do not mind putting ALL of our stuff online. Besides server compromises and XSS exploits, the data can be easily disclosed in even a simple civil or divorce court case. At least with your own computer you can delete the files, use encryption or simply throw the hard drive away in the dumpster. Besides, what happens if the provider decides to suddenly discontinue the service or start charging $50/month?

Re:The Truman Show

[QuantumG]

Privacy is for old people.

The kids, they love to be stalked.

WebApps == Utopia

[Anonymous Coward]

Web application developers/promoters seem to think we are living in a utopian society, with free Fiber-like speeds everywhere.

I have news for these people, internet connections go down, servers crash, on-line servers get hacked.

I like having an application on my laptop (portable), where I can access it anywhere. I don't need an internet connection to get at my data. USB keys, CD-ROMS, DVDs provide enough.

Software, as flaky as it is, can also be resold when I am done with it.

Try selling a subscription to some web service that you don't need / no longer want.

Software developers want a market that operates like the cellphone market, pay $20.00/mo, independant of usage of the service. Then add 'micropayments' for 'features'. A sure fire way of ensuring revenue, while nickel and diming consumers to death.

I will always buy standalone software. You can pry my copy of Office/Visual Studio from my cold dead hands, or when I sell it for say 50%. Take that away, and I can use OpenOffice, and good old GCC/G++.

Software wants to be like a utility company. Pay for the service, weather you use it or not. Without any of the regulation, security, or acccountability. Sorry, doesn't work in my book.

"Matches"?

[Jay L]

Live Documents matches features found in Office 2007

They're obviously trying to position this to be "as powerful as Office 2007", but they can't even bring themselves to use THAT much vague puffery?

My personal site also matches features found in Office 2007. It's blue.

Be afraid mere mortals - we crack codes !

[steveoc]

So let me get this right - Firstly, 2000 Microsoft programmers spend 3 years developing MS Office, and then lock it up with some sort of secret code, and proceed to make money selling it as a desktop application.

After that, 32 software engineers in India put in many hard hours over a 4 year period to "crack the code" of MS Office. Thats like 4 years of tedious mathematical analysis .. comparing ciphers, testing hypothesis, following hunches, kidnapping and interrogating suspects who may have had some involvement with the original Microsoft effort.

After 4 years of this seemingly endless and fruitless intellectual struggle .. this battle of wits and minds .. they make a breakthrough ! Excitedly, they gather together at 3am after an exhausting marathon code breaking session. Behind them the blackboard is covered in equations, diagrams, the chalk dust of many previous failures and deadends. Today's ciphers are layed out on a large table, aligned correctly, and checked and double checked once more. And then they place the ciphers one on top of another and roll the result into a single, extremely complex equation that just might work this time.

This new equation is fed into the computer banks and the hard disks begin whirring away for one more time.

Some hours later, as the sun is well on its journey into the sky, the hard drives stop whirring. Everyone in the team gathers around the green glow of the monitor in the dead silence, the sweat glistening on their faces drawn tight with exhaustion and tension. After a moment that lasts a lifetime .. the words :

C O D E - C R A C K E D

appear in capitals on the monitor, and the dusty old dot matrix printer begins printing out the secret Microsoft Office code word. But admist the jubilation, the computer hackers remain calm .. the world may now be theirs, but there is still remains work to do. Armed now with the secret code word to Microsoft Office, they skillfully manipulate the code word, shuffling and re-ordering the code word ever so slightly - like cyber Gods adjusting the DNA of a dangerous new species - until they are done.

Barely hours after breaking the secret code, the new modified code word is overlaid onto Microsoft Office and fed back into the computer. The hard drives whirr noisily one more time, and then the result appears on the screen. They now have Microsoft Office working as an online application !!!

Im glad that the times newspaper in the UK decided to print this story .. because it gives the inside view on how IT really is .. this tense, frustrating, demanding, clandestine and often dangerous occupation that we geeks take for granted. Its time for the common man in the street to give us the fear and respect that we so obviously deserve. We are programmers - We crack codes ! Be afraid - Be very afraid.