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

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.

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:The Truman Show

[QuantumG]

Privacy is for old people.

The kids, they love to be stalked.

Re:One thing missing...

[ColdWetDog]

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

Lame.