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November 2, 2005

Office Live Will Be A Huge Productivity Tool

Michael Arrington

47 comments »

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.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. blackrimglasses.com » Office Live Will Be A Huge Productivity Tool

    November 2nd, 2005 at 6:11 pm

  2. CrunchNotes » Microsoft Live Event - My Real Time Notes

    November 2nd, 2005 at 8:49 pm

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  4. raduionescu.ro » Oare doar eu am inteles altceva?

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  5. Brave New Word

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  6. Editsite.net

    November 3rd, 2005 at 5:04 pm

  7. Jeremy Chone Weblog » Blog Archive » Windows Live … me too …. me too

    November 3rd, 2005 at 11:48 pm

  8. lawfully » Blog Archive » Office live

    November 4th, 2005 at 12:40 am

  9. Web2Tools.com » Office Live

    November 4th, 2005 at 2:33 am

  10. RJ Martino’s Web Log » Blog Archive » Microsoft Live the new IIP

    November 9th, 2005 at 11:25 pm

  11. TechCrunch » Windows Live Email Service

    November 25th, 2005 at 4:46 pm

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    January 6th, 2006 at 2:47 pm

  13. Solo Technology » Blog Archive » MS Office Live

    January 28th, 2006 at 9:16 pm

  14. TechCrunch » Microsoft Office Live goes into Beta

    February 15th, 2006 at 6:40 pm

  15. TechCrunch en français » Microsoft office Live sort en version beta

    February 15th, 2006 at 9:55 pm

  16. Gansik blog » Blog Archive » Microsoft Office Live goes into Beta

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    August 27th, 2006 at 10:15 pm

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Comments

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  1. Ilkka Huotari

    November 2nd, 2005 at 7:03 pm

    The start sounded pretty much like my Editsite.net… Oh my.

  2. Mike

    November 2nd, 2005 at 7:08 pm

    Uh, look out 37 signals. The big boys want your 2.0 ribbons.

  3. EmailHosting.com

    November 2nd, 2005 at 7:14 pm

    Wow! Thanks for letting me know about Office Live. Those conferences are really worth attending, huh?

  4. børge

    November 2nd, 2005 at 7:19 pm

    “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.

  5. Chris

    November 2nd, 2005 at 8:17 pm

    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!

  6. Ilkka Huotari

    November 2nd, 2005 at 8:37 pm

    What are open source standards?

  7. sidd

    November 3rd, 2005 at 7:16 am

    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. :)

  8. Matt Baldwin

    November 3rd, 2005 at 9:19 am

    Michael,

    I posted a thread to Microsoft’s ASP.NET hosting forums:

    http://forums.asp.net/1101150/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

  9. Jawad

    December 13th, 2005 at 9:00 pm

    May I have a demonstration copy of the software?

  10. Natalie

    February 15th, 2006 at 8:29 pm

    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.

  11. Sidd Jha

    June 19th, 2006 at 7:14 pm

    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

  12. Sidd Jha

    June 19th, 2006 at 7:20 pm

    Thanks for the updates Mr. Jha. I would really like to submit my bugs for the Reload. Thanks!

    Sidd Jha
    Microsoft Corp. Directr

  13. ericsson

    June 24th, 2006 at 10:47 am

    eu to cheio de emeios mas nao tem neum da widows live mail

  14. girls

    September 29th, 2006 at 10:36 pm

    http://knottight.275mb.com/

  15. altArtifact

    January 13th, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    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.

  16. Bizarre News

    January 18th, 2007 at 6:42 am

    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.

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