Comments on: Microsoft's Hotmail founder goes for the (wrong) Office jugular with Live Documents

Microsoft just got another web-based competitor to Office. I doubt it's terribly worried.

[ctfoley]

you have a good point

if you think about it, a single text box could be used for writing, emailing, search, anything

[sachxn]

online office is a near future

Yes its correct that Zimbra like products are the future but are today's companies ready to embrace that future or not. I still see strong market for online office as the next step to desktop office.
Sachin
http://qtp.blogspot.com

[ringshall]

It all depends on what you mean by "the future"

You are probably right about the long-term outlook for MS Office et al, but if you can secure a sizeable share of the market over the next five years or so, that's not so bad is it? We shouldn't always see things in absolute terms.

[LiveDocuments]

Response from Live Documents

Sumanth from the Live Documents team here...

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

[LiveDocuments]

And in addition...

since your company, Alfresco, offers content/document management solutions, you might be interested to know that Live Documents provides all the document management features that you offer - workflow, auditable content, tagging, advanced search - but without requiring users to log in to a centralized respositary and do things like check-in/check-out...with Live Documents, all these capabilities are embedded in the document context and travel with it...so for instance, if you open a document requiring approval in Word, you will be notified of the requirement and you can approve it in-situ without having to fire up a browser. Also, we support auditing at a granular level - at a cell level in Excel and at a slide level in PowerPoint - without requiring the user to do anything extra...
Cheers,
Sumanth
For the Live Documents team

[sachman1]

It's just old fashioned competetion

http://tinyurl.com/2rqvrk