Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week

walterbyrd writes "Microsoft will offer an online version of Office 2010 for free. I have to wonder, will this remain free indefinitely? Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard, then go back to business as usual?" Probably a harder sell after Google's acquisition of DocVerse.

Comments

Requires .EXE Download

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

As a number of people in the Seattle Times Forum have noted, using this "web based" Office product *requires* downloading and installing an .exe

Re:Is it safe?

[guruevi]

I concur. I make programs that generate documents based on some of these 'open' standards.
- LaTeX is really the only thing you can trust if you want an editable text document. However (sadly) outside of scientific literature it's hardly used.
- PDF and PostScript is great if you want a read only document, it works but I don't think it's really an open standard. It's more of a form of output, not really a form of carrying information.
- ODF is an open standard and works really well but sadly not all editors interpret all tags the same.
- OOXML is the worst of all. You simply can't open/read OOXML documents generated by Microsoft Office programmatically - sometimes they won't even pass an XML parser, you can generate documents programmatically according to the OOXML standard but a lot of the functionality (simple things like hyperlinks) will be misinterpreted by Microsoft Office and possibly corrupt the document (unreadable to all) if re-saved in Office.

Parent IS NOT "informative".

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Parent IS NOT "informative". You may not create new documents with this web app unless you have the EXE installed. The Parent is "Uninformed".