The other product announced yesterday at the Microsoft Preview event in San Francisco was Office Live. Office Live will launch in Q1 2006.
My raw notes from the event are on CrunchNotes, and my profile on Windows Live went up last night. Rajesh Jha presented the product.
Office Live is not an online version of Office.
Office Live is a set of free, ad-supported productivity tools for businesses that will really help the small guys. The service will also have a premium subscription product that will have “less” ads, according to Bill Gates yesterday.
The core tools are a free non-microsoft domain name, website and up to 50 email accounts with 2 GB of storage each. Rajesh created a new website in the demo, adding content and images, in a minute or so. For a small company needing a informational website, it will be great. Given that the domain name, website building, hosting and email will all be free, this will be very attractive to a small business.
For customers needing more, Microsoft will offer a suite of additional productivity applications – 22 in all were announced yesterday. They will also support third party applications – ADP’s payroll software was shown integrated into Office Live. A set of APIs will be available for third parties to add their application functionality into Office Live.
Among the additional applications was an office document collaboration tool. You can share an office document real time with others, allowing them to view and edit it. Impressive.
Office Live should become a starting point for small businesses wanting a web presence and a general platform to run their business operations.
If Microsoft can hold on to them as they grow by offering additional services, it will become a lucrative product for them. And the ad inventory they will generate from page views will also be highly valuable to advertisers selling into the small business space.
There is a real chance Office Live will be one of the big revenue generators for Microsoft, both from advertising and subscription fees.
The start sounded pretty much like my Editsite.net… Oh my.
Uh, look out 37 signals. The big boys want your 2.0 ribbons.
Wow! Thanks for letting me know about Office Live. Those conferences are really worth attending, huh?
“Among the additional applications was an office document collaboration tool. You can share an office document real time with others, allowing them to view and edit it. Impressive.”
How is this impressive? Writely.com and some other other web 2.0 apps does this already.
Hello Micheal,
I think this is a great idea, but there are already a number of products out there that offer more functionality and work in all browsers. Check out http://www.officegateway.ca. It is an excellent product based on open source standards.
Great post!
What are open source standards?
Wow, from what this promises, this is certainly going to be the most extensive web productivity tool we have seen yet. It certainly seems to offer far more than what 37signals are aiming at.
But then again, MS have a habit of building their products up too much and then letting the techheads down when the it is actually launched.
Im going to keep a close eye on this one.
Michael,
I posted a thread to Microsoft’s ASP.NET hosting forums:
http://forums.a...0/ShowPost.aspx
concering how this might threaten traditional web hosting market, especially since Microsoft has been pushing on the collective us to host their product suites. It’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.
-matt
May I have a demonstration copy of the software?
I dunno… I go this error when signing up with firefox: “You are not using a recent version of Internet Explorer and need to download it in order to use Office Live.” I thought web 2.0 was all about open standards and bashing down the proprietary barriers that have hooked small businesses to Microsoft for so long. This definately looks like a great leap backwards.
Wow! This is great! But the sad thing is that I have found some bugs while using Office Live. If you could contact me Rajesh then that would be great!
Thanks!
Sidd Jha
Microsoft Corp. Director
Thanks for the updates Mr. Jha. I would really like to submit my bugs for the Reload. Thanks!
Sidd Jha
Microsoft Corp. Directr
eu to cheio de emeios mas nao tem neum da widows live mail
http://knottight.275mb.com/
Well, huge but productivity has yet to be proven. Let’s hope they get the bugs worked out some day and actually offer users something great. My site is built with Office Live Basics.
Sounds like yet another reason to get our hopes up, and yet another reason for MS to dash thm to the rocks. Too many promises for my taste. I’m waiting for at least version 2.0.
baxqmke pmwix fcmiybje ikcde oncydzilg dyoibcv aqpy