Microsoft's Hotmail founder goes for the (wrong) Office jugular with Live Documents
Sabeer Bhatia, one of the co-founders of Hotmail (bought by Microsoft for $400 million ten years ago), is on a mission to lobotomize Microsoft's $20 billion Office business. He has an uphill climb.
Bhatia is behind Live Documents, a web-based competitor to Microsoft Word, which purports to offer enterprises an upgrade path beyond the $400/seat offer from Microsoft. The question is, "Don't we already have Google Docs for this?"
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. Aricent, an Indian software services group with 6,700 employees, is the first client.
Live Documents is similar to Google Apps, launched in February and used by companies including Proctor & Gamble, General Electric and Capgemini as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft. However, Mr Bhatia claims that his product is superior to Google's in its range and quality, most crucially because it mimics Office 2007. Most of Office's estimated 500 million customers have yet to upgrade from the 2003 version, while it is not available for Apple computers.
He said. "This will do for documents what Hotmail did for e-mail."
Fill computers with lots of spam? I can't wait.
Actually, it's unclear to me why this is any better than Google Docs or the slew of other online document services, all of which purport to be the death of Microsoft Office (and yet I still see it limping around from time to time, buried under the weight of $20 billion in sales :-). The best alternative I've seen to Office is actually OpenOffice, not some sexy, new web-based competitor.
Yet nothing seems to really touch Microsoft's Office business. Why? Because all of these efforts look backward, rather than forward. The future isn't web-based document creation. If anything, it's an email client (like Zimbra) that does away with the need for "documents" at all and makes the focus on collaboration and distribution, not creation.
The future of the desktop is not an online desktop. It's getting rid of the desktop metaphor altogether. The future of an office suite is to dump the office and focus where people spend their time: email, IM, SMS, blogs, etc. We increasingly collaborate as we create rather than create so that we can then collaborate on what we've already done.
Look at Microsoft's idea of office collaboration. It's mired in the era of Flock of Seagulls and The Buggles. Microsoft is desperately trying to upgrade this vision with Sharepoint because its Exchange technology is so old and creaky that it can't support the innovation that would other ensure Microsoft's next two decades of dominance.
Now is the time to go for the Microsoft Office jugular, but not with Yet Another Web-based Office Competitor (YAWBOC). That's the wrong way to disrupt a market. A company like Zimbra/Yahoo can shift the rules of the game to focus on email as the "Office suite," not some stodgy old Word program.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
%20Office%20jugular%20with%20Live%20Documents%20%7C%20The%20Open%20Road%20-%20CNET%20News&srcUrl=http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9822554-16.html){kind=small}
Sachin
http://qtp.blogspot.com
In response to your points:
- First up, we offer the entire Office suite - online equivalents of Word, Excel and PowerPoint - and not just Word as you have mentioned. If it was only Word then yes, many of your points on create vs. collaborate are true but it is far more complex when your data is in a spreadsheet or presentation. Moreover, if all content was simply data that could be presented as Word documents, then Alfresco would be just as redundant as our offering!
- Also, when we say that we are an "online" Office suite, we are not limiting ourselves to just a browser-centric experience. While we do offer a browser-based service that offers functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, we also offer a client application that makes your existing version of Microsoft Office web-enabled. So, whatever version of Office you might have (2000, XP, 2003 or even 2007), we web-enable it and provide collaborative capabilities on the desktop - users can then live within these familiar applications and experience both the richness of the desktop application as well as the collaborative capabilities of online services in terms of multi-user editing, discussions, automatic content updates etc. The point is that "online" need not be synonymous with "browser" and there are other ways to take applications online. With Live Documents, users have the choice and flexiblity of working on their desktop or on the browser and enjoy the same application experience on both sides (our browser version is based on RIA technologies like Flash - so it makes for a rich and responsive user interface) - any changes made to a document on either platform are automatically synchronized to the other side.
- How are we better than Google docs? Well, for starters, Google docs is only available as a browser-based service while, as I have mentioned above, we offer a hybrid solution that can be used on the browser or on the desktop and whether you are online or offline.
Also, Google docs is not a benchmark for us because Google itself has steadfastly held (at least in public) that it is not competing with Microsoft. We, on the other hand, are competing with Microsoft Office at least in one dynamic - the Office 2007 upgrade that Microsoft is advocating...we are telling users that if they already have an older version of Microsoft Office, they can web-enable it with Live Documents and access the same capabilities that Office 2007 offers on both productivity and collaboration dimensions (in consort with server-side applications like SharePoint) without needing to forklift their entire infrastructure. So, as it turns out, we are actually making Microsoft Office itself more powerful in many dimensions - we are not attempting to "kill Microsoft Office" in any way...we are simply leveraging the fact that for many users, their existing version of Office is good enough on the productivity dimension and we are layering on the collaboration dimension on top of this.
Hope this helps present a better picture on our offering and while you are certainly entitled to be dismissive of our solution, perhaps it would have been in good form to at least take a look at it first hand prior to writing us off summarily!
Cheers,
Sumanth
Cheers,
Sumanth
For the Live Documents team
- It's just old fashioned competetion
- by sachman1 November 23, 2007 10:14 PM PST
- http://tinyurl.com/2rqvrk
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(6 Comments)