It’s painful to watch Microsoft wake up slowly to the threat posed by a growing gaggle of Web-based office productivity software, led by Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Back in October, Microsoft announced its intention to make Office Live actually revolve around sharing documents online (as opposed to the website-hosting and e-mail service that it was before). As a result, Office Live will now have two services: Office Live Small Business and Office Live Workspace.
Even though Microsoft announced it two months ago, the (still-private) beta for Office Live Workspace launches today. That means beta users can finally start testing the service. You can sign up here to get on the waiting list for an invite (Windows Live ID required). Microsoft briefed me on the service and gave me access to a demo account.
I should note that at the time of the initial announcement, we were underwhelmed. For one thing, Microsoft did not explain whether the new Office Live Workspace would even let you create new documents online or edit existing ones after you uploaded them to the Web. Well, you can do both, sort of.
The big surprise is that Office Live Workspace includes a decent online word processor called Web Notes that is comparable in most ways to other Web-based alternatives. It is fast, supports a handful of different fonts, font sizes, and formatting. Nothing too fancy, but enough to write a memo, take notes, or even write a draft of an article. There is no spellcheck, though. And—its Achilles’ Heel—you cannot export a document from Web Notes to your desktop. Anything you write in Web Notes is trapped inside Office Live.
If Web Notes feels like an afterthought, that is because it is. The way you are supposed to write documents in Office Live is with Microsoft Word. Once you upload a Word document to Office Live, it automatically syncs every time you make a change on your desktop. So you edit in Word, and all the changes are reflected in the version on Office Live. (Goodbye, Live Documents). Office Live is a hosted version of Sharepoint. Unfortunately, this works only if you have a Windows machine running XP or Vista, with Office XP or a later version. The syncing does not work on a Mac at all.
Assuming you do have a PC running a recent version of Office (a safe assumption for most people), the integration and syncing works pretty seamlessly. With one click you can save a document to your desktop and it opens up in Word, where you can work on it. Then when you close it, the new version is saved to Office Live automatically. On Office Live, you can share the document with others, who can make comments inside Office Live, or edit it themselves by going through the same process of downloading it into Word. Office Live keeps track of all the different versions.
There is a certain logic to this. For one thing, it protects Microsoft’s desktop Office cash-cow business because you need Office to take advantage of Office Live. But given that most people are still more comfortable using the desktop apps they are already familiar with, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Letting people continue writing in Word and auto-syncing to Office Live plays to Microsoft’s strengths and makes online document sharing easy. People hardly have to change their behavior at all. The problem is that Microsoft does not give you the option to do things any other way.
Office Live, at this early stage, is nothing more than an online viewer and file-sharing service. Microsoft upped the storage limit to 500 MB, enough for more than 1000 documents. You can upload many file types—Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, images, PDFs—but they all remain read-only within Office Live. The only exception is documents written in Web Notes, which can’t be exported unless you cut and paste. It is enough to drive you crazy.
Granted, this is version 1.0 of a beta. It will get better. One of the Microsoft execs who visited made it clear to me that the company’s goal is “bridge the gap between the online and offline world so that people don’t have to care where a document lives.” He also suggested online editing capabilities would be coming “maybe next year.”
But come on. If Google and a dozen startups can create online productivity apps that let you edit in the browser, so can Microsoft. And those potential competitors are not standing still. Every month Microsoft waits to fully wade into the Webtop waters, is another month that Google, Zoho, Adobe, Glide, and the rest have to close the gap with Office on the desktop. And who knows? They might even start to steal its customers.
Yeah I agree it appears they are wising up.
http://www.whatshottoday.com
Reminds me of this old joke…
Google’s going to produce all the cool stuff and buy over all the good web 2.0 companies and then…
Microsoft will buy over Google
LOL…
Personal Development for the Book Smart
http://RichGrad.com
So much for Live Documents challenge to take on the industry bigwigs. I reckon Live Documents would be in the deadpool list in less than a year.
Still needs work?
That Gaggle wannabe office crap needs work!
The Techcrunch staffers need work!
You grammar needs work!
#4: Apart from Google Docs, all of them (Zoho, Live Documents) are heading for the deadpool.
Some of the things that Zoho and Live Documents are good at:
1) Create “toy” prototypes
2) Get hyped/blogged by Web 2.0 “journalists” – never by actual users
3) Virtually beg for Google/MS to buy them
Come on, creating a product like MS Office is hard. It took a Charles Simonyi to code the first version of MS Word.
MS owns the office space for a reason: they have the most powerful and easy to use tools available today.
Now, how many of those Office users really need to share those documents real-time outside of their company’s walls? A small fraction. As the need evolves, so will MS. Supporting the MAC will occur when it is justified by the numbers.
Eric: Have you ever run a business of any scale? Your writings continue to be steeped in idealism rather than sound business fundamentals.
“You grammar needs work?”
Are you serious? You make it way too easy Fake Steve.
So what you’re saying is that it will work just fine for the vast majority of people out there who’ve never heard of (much less been exposed to) Google Docs. Given the current state of Google Docs that may not be such a bad thing.
Hail Microsoft… Good stuff.. well done.
Too many analysts are enough poisoned by the Google exuberance, rational or otherwise.
Buy a little wiki outfit and call it a Word killer?.. naive.
Fake Steve Ballmer is probably the lamest of the “fake” blogs. Which is sad because it’s probably the one idea that had the most potential. Unfortunately the writer lacks any creative talent.
I ran across a need for this the other day…
We have a remote project manager…who’s office is not connected to us via VPN or any other means. We have many excel and word documents sure would be nice to ’share’ related to the projects he manages. There is no way I could convince management to go with a third party web product four our critical (and often sensitive) documents…but a microsoft solution to allow us to see/edit those docs and have them synced up would be a no-brainer (assuming cost was low)
I’ve yet to play with this, but I have to admit I don’t follow the ‘Everything should be in a browser’ mantra. And I say this as an avid Gmail in the browser user…
I’d rather have the best native application on whatever OS I’m using, but be able to share docs with other users via ‘the cloud’ without intervention from the IS dept.
I don’t buy the line that Microsoft are trailing here – it’s more that they seem to be making their desktop apps ‘cloud ready’, which seems to be a perfectly valid approach.
I think most of us already have sharepoint at work and VPN connects us to the office. If you don’t, your co. is lame. This is for College kids and new comers that are starting off with their bundled Laptops and PCs, which will later lead them to them asking for it at work!
Great job MSFT! MSFT will be at 45 by summer 2008.
#8
Very funny …
virb.com/balm/
can you do that Anti-FSB?
So in other words: it’s an online office suite which uses Microsoft Office as the client, rather than a browser.
Yep, a fairly predictable idea; logical even. Worse, it might even gain traction if ordinary users just adopt it like zombies, because that’s what Microsoft has told them to do.
Thanks for this. Looking forward to an overview of the current online office-apps situation.
Not sure how anyone claims Microsoft is trailing in this space.
Google spreadsheets are good for collaboration but we send word docs around via email. I still think the battle ground will be around spreadsheets not the whole Office suite.
Slideshare for online powerpoint presentations are going gangbusters – http://jasonmci...soft-power.html.
I think people will have to wait until Bill G’s last keynote to see the new new office. What way to end his tenure but to completely destroy the online doc space with the silverlight powered online office.
June’s been smoking the MS wacky weed:
“MS owns the office space for a reason: they have the most powerful and easy to use tools available today.”
-Ah, yeah they may “own” the market, but it’s by no means because it’s either the most powerful and definitely not the easiest to use (in fact the two today are almost mutually exclusive).
“Now, how many of those Office users really need to share those documents real-time outside of their company’s walls? A small fraction. As the need evolves, so will MS. Supporting the MAC will occur when it is justified by the numbers.”
-Spoken like a true MS communist. When you follow the masses, then you can be one of the…masses. Sorry, but at my huge company and in my small consulting jobs, we share more than ever today, and these are “expected” tools today. In fact, at big co today we use MS sharepoint (switching soon to a non MS product) and in my small co things, we use Google and zoho. As for the Mac snide remark, even my huge co now lets me buy Macs again, so please go get real.
“Eric: Have you ever run a business of any scale? Your writings continue to be steeped in idealism rather than sound business fundamentals.”
-Nothing wrong with idealism June, it’s how this country got started, not by following the masses. In fact, let’s see, where is the Soviet Union today? What state is China in today politically? Hmmm, yeah, idealism sucks.
These online office suites are so far behind what’s on our desktops I don’t really get it. At least the collaboration is good with google.
Its wide open …
Why is Adobe, Yahoo, IBM asleep in this war?
“If Google and a dozen startups can create online productivity apps that let you edit in the browser, so can Microsoft.” — here lies an assumption that MS coders have the same motivation of ramen-eating Zoho coders; which is untrue. People inside MS are more concerned with the gossip and who’s getting the pay package and so on… they’re living in another universe, apart from the pressure of the deadpool.
“It’s painful to watch Microsoft wake up slowly to the threat posed by a growing gaggle of Web-based office productivity software”–C’mon, that’s the great thing about the new world: Microsoft is, slowly, dying. It’s not going to the deadpool, but it will become IBM-ized. Microsoft is becoming a rather unimportant creature that once defined all existence.
Your bias against mentioning or linking to Buzzword is, to me, incredible, and sad.
who in their right mind will use google spreadsheets for business…..its great for divvying up cost among room mates…..
it’s funny how Erick called Microsoft slow moving when they launched their beta product in 2 months…..how about google man….they launched docs and spreadsheets more than a year ago and it still sucks….ever comment on that….or is it Papa Arrington’s policy not to say anything against google else your page rank might suffer…..
@Paul, Are you kidding me? If anyone is smoking something it is certainly you. What kinds of drugs are you taking to actually extrapolate my comments to comparisons with controlled societies like China? You too obviously have no experience making decisions based on sound business logic backed by facts and rather prefer to pontificate your hyperbole. What a load!
As soon as it has a real ‘print layout view’ and not the silly ‘normal view’ like Google, I sure will go to MS. I want to see the real page not a huge white background.
Google’s Docs is for playing around, for business users MS products are still the best.
Google needed years to INTEGRATE an existing application (Writely), MS started a couple of months ago and it looks like Writely / Google Docs does now…
I am using zigime workspace and its quite good. Its quite different from Google Docs and office live though, but useful. I think it will take some time to become popular, especially among Groups but nowadays people are enjoying to do work in zigime workspace