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Microsoft Faces Fight Against Online Office Rival
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Nov 22, 2007 05:20 PM
from the docs-on-the-move dept.
from the docs-on-the-move dept.
bharatm writes "It's now been a decade since Microsoft bought Hotmail, the web-based e-mail service, for about $400 million. Now Sabeer Bhatia (the site's co-founder) is challenging the software giant's core $20 billion office desktop business. Yesterday Sabeer Bhatia released a free online rival to the bestselling Office suite of applications that will allow users to view, share and edit documents from any computer. '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.'"
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Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
They may be ready to challenge the validity of Microsoft's claim to Office by itself as a trademark. While there is no question that Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows, etc. are valid trademarks, the validity of Office, Word, Windows etc. is questionable since these are arguably generic terms that Microsoft cannot remove from the public domain. There are quite a few other office suites with Office as part of their name, e.g. KOffice, Gnome Office, Xoom Office, Star Office.
Parent
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a brand of kitchen towels in Brazil I think called "Linux". Has the entity that protects the Linux trademark gone after them? No. Would they go after ReactOS if they decided to re-brand themselves and sell their wares under the "Linux" name? Probably.
As far as the courts are concerned, it's all about context. That's why "Lindows" got nailed. If they were selling Pokemon stickers Microsoft probably wouldn't have bothered, don't you think?
Parent
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, Lindows won on the trademark issue, in the United States. See the Wikipedia article on Lindows [wikipedia.org]. Microsoft finally offered to settle, and the Lindows people agreed since Microsoft had sued them in six countries and dealing with all the suits was such a hassle.
The fact that numerous other office suites with office in their name exist is pretty good evidence that Microsoft can't claim a valid trademark.
Parent
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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C//
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
I always thought trademarks were designed to protect companies/consumers when small companies stole names, designs and images from anouther and mislead consumers into buying their product. This would seem like an open and shut case of a website trying to pretend it has Microsoft Office and mislead people into using it for that reason. If they want to tout how the apps looks extremely similar to MS Office let them but lets not use identical images and icons.
Parent
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The Live Document site seems to be /.-ed, but if it uses the Microsoft logo etc. then that may well be deceptive and infringing. But that is different from the name being infringing.
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the site: "Live Documents provides you with a full Office productivity suite - Word, Excel and PowerPoint - with built-in collaboration features right out of your browser - no more dependence on Microsoft Office and Windows and no more format lock-in!" So there is a full office suite online. It also sounds like the online suite might be using the names "Word", "Excel", and "Powerpoint". That is a problem.
However they also have a Microsoft office add-in that more or less allows one to use Microsoft Office as an offline non-browser client. In fact, it looks like they intend this to be the usual way to edit documents, using the online editors only when Microsoft office is not available.
Their site does definitely use too many copies of the Microsoft office logo, and the Microsoft Office screen shots are somewhat misleading, especially as there very few screen shots of the browser-based editor.
Parent
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Version 4 is still available, see:
http://www.vendornation.com/*ws4d-db-query-QuickShow?vp001 [vendornation.com]
Tho the site looks somewhat broken...
I used to use VistaLite and VistaPro on the Amiga back in the days. It started out as just Vista, then as it got more features it was renamed VistaPro but the extra features meant it wouldn't run on most standard Amigas, and thus VistaLite was born as a stripped down version requiring much less memory.
Wikipedia has a brief article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaPro [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They are, I think, doing this on purpose, hoping for the publicity from being sued by MS. They are probably gambling on the fact that the money they might lose would be less than what an equivalent marketing campaign would buy them. Besides, they might pull back and "oblige" before it's too late, complying to MS' demand to change their name. By then, everybody + dog will know about the service
One thing missing... (Score:5, Informative)
Here it is: the Live Documents website [live-documents.com].
Not had a look yet, though as I've only found a limited use for Google Documents (the spreadsheet application is great for collaboration) I doubt it will be of any use to me. Open Office is good enough for me, if not everyone.
Re:One thing missing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lame.
Parent
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Lame, indeed.
Next...
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And how is that different from Google Docs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing to see here, move along people.
Re:And how is that different from Google Docs? (Score:4, Funny)
- RG>
Parent
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It allows off-line use for one thing. They will be releasing an MS Office plugin soon. This is a big deal for me. I would like to access my documents from anywhere but I also like the richness of desktop tools. Google talked about it but nothing concrete so far as I know.
Yeah, forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty cool.
"Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft's licensed technology."
Okay, that's fucking stupid.
Office apps that REQUIRE a working network/internet connection to function are something that any sane IT department would stay FAR FAR away from. We just don't live in a world where everyone can be connected to the internet all of the time. And even when that day comes, most people would like to have their apps run locally, just in case.
The whole idea of "hosted desktop apps" is dubious (and I'm not even considering the inevitable "rental fees", which is a whole 'nuther scam). It might work for little "one-time use" stuff, but no one would ever rely on them for day-to-day work.
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Is is just me or we're slowly going back to square one? That is, to the days when all you had was a terminal connected to a time sharing system you paid to rent resources from?
RT
--
Your Bookmarks. Anywhere. Anytime. [simplybookmarks.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They did it that way back then because computers were obscenely expensive and rare.
Now they're plentiful and cheap, but expensive to administer effectively... there's still an economy of scale there, especially for smaller businesses.
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It's just you. We aren't heading back to "square one" - the world where you had a terminal connected to a time-sharing system you paid to rent resources from. But that original world still exists, and in certain situations, still makes lots of sense.
1) Accessing applications online with vendors on their systems means that support cost
Re:Yeah, forget it (Score:5, Informative)
About a year in, we added a plug-in to store backup versions of the docs on the user's hard disk to supplement the auto-save (in the case of a lost connection during editing, which of course does happen occasionally) - but other than that things have pretty much "just worked". Honestly, the docs have caused less problems than we used to have with Word: there's nothing to configure incorrectly, there's no choice about where to save, there's nothing to install, and there's far fewer features to abuse. It's much easier to protect the user from themselves and to enforce business rules in documents. As a bonus, users can work from home without buying their own software, or having compatibility hassles.
Pretty much everything our users do is done using a browser and hosted centrally; it has been an unqualified success and an IT dream. I can't imagine how much pain we've avoided by missing 5 generations of new Word problems. I think back to the time when we had to install apps on every machine, and I shudder.
Parent
Re:Yeah, forget it (Score:5, Informative)
The application isn't overly bandwidth intensive, and some of our users access it over cell-type connections. But really this hasn't impacted us too much - the nature of our business means that our production staff who travel will usually be dictating rather than typing themselves (and it's easy to upload the dictation files when you're back to some kind of good connection). Also, to be fair, many of our users (especially marketing) have other Word processors they use for documents not tied to production, like proposals or brochures or labels and what not. Our app is not a general purpose word processor: we had the luxury of designing it around a limited set of needs.
In terms of business rules, we've found it to be very convenient - though a proper content management system would do most of the same things. Naturally it's easy to control who can see what, who can edit what, what's available to what clients online, etc. We can also make certain elements of documents uneditable, or only editable via our own tools (and the relevant data captured back). For example: our users produce a lot of reports, and in the past they would tend to put tabled information in reports and nowhere else (meaning we couldn't analyze that data later). Now, they enter that data one time, in a structured way through a plugin in the word processor, and it's persisted in the database as well as being on the report. This is of course possible with a regular word processor as well, but I think some parts would be much more difficult to manage. When you're dealing with a small subset of word processing functionality, and a small/standard codebase for the UI, many of these things are trivial.
I imagine there are a lot better options out there now than when we built this years ago (and it quite possibly wouldn't be the right choice now) but it has worked out well for us.
Parent
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And no, we didn't actually spend that long in development (one developer, me, times about 3 months at the start) and no, it doesn't take people long to train - because the t
Anouther Web Application Oh Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Next a small upstart company will be telling us how they have a image manipulation program you uses through the web which will replace photoshop.
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Agreed, confidential documents (Score:2, Insightful)
These types of things are fine for college & high school kids that have very little confidential information. But when you become an adult, you need control over your information.
There is no way I going to write a letter involving a financial transaction on one of these things. Plus, I have been around long enough to see these things come and go, and my data along with it.
Also, what business is going to use this? If you run a law firm, medical office, or financial business you are legally requ
The Truman Show (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Truman Show (Score:5, Funny)
The kids, they love to be stalked.
Parent
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I for one haven't even progressed to naked mindspace photos. Link please.
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How many online office rivals do we really need? (Score:4, Insightful)
The market for such online suites seem rather thin to me.
slashdot, home of the infomercial (Score:2, Insightful)
this is about as much of a competitor to microsoft as a cockroach is a competitor to me
I liked this better... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where credits due... (Score:2, Interesting)
Way to make it sound like it's a new and original idea instead of a copy and paste of what Google Docs has done.
and from the article..
Don't want that cheap knockoff now do we..
WebApps == Utopia (Score:4, Insightful)
I have news for these people, internet connections go down, servers crash, on-line servers get hacked.
I like having an application on my laptop (portable), where I can access it anywhere. I don't need an internet connection to get at my data. USB keys, CD-ROMS, DVDs provide enough.
Software, as flaky as it is, can also be resold when I am done with it.
Try selling a subscription to some web service that you don't need / no longer want.
Software developers want a market that operates like the cellphone market, pay $20.00/mo, independant of usage of the service. Then add 'micropayments' for 'features'. A sure fire way of ensuring revenue, while nickel and diming consumers to death.
I will always buy standalone software. You can pry my copy of Office/Visual Studio from my cold dead hands, or when I sell it for say 50%. Take that away, and I can use OpenOffice, and good old GCC/G++.
Software wants to be like a utility company. Pay for the service, weather you use it or not. Without any of the regulation, security, or acccountability. Sorry, doesn't work in my book.
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especially after the company offering it dies...
ummm (Score:4, Informative)
"Matches"? (Score:5, Funny)
They're obviously trying to position this to be "as powerful as Office 2007", but they can't even bring themselves to use THAT much vague puffery?
My personal site also matches features found in Office 2007. It's blue.
A bunch of hot air? (Score:3, Informative)
Poking around on those web pages, it gets to: [live-documents.com]
Getting Started with Live Documents
Sign Up
Before you get started you'll need to set up your account. It just takes a few seconds: sign up here for an invitation to our technology preview.
Then:
Sign up to get invited
Live Documents is currently available in a technology preview mode on an on-invitation basis. To request an invite to this private beta, please sign up below.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
The overlooked VBA aspect (Score:3, Interesting)
Does Google Apps offer VBA or something like it? Does Live Documents? Does OpenOffice? I'm pretty sure they don't (but admit to being too lazy to fact check this).
So it's game-over for businesses. Have fun with the Mums and Dads and teenagers but they're never going to pay you more than a few peanuts. Until you can match VBA in applications, MSO wins.
Be afraid mere mortals - we crack codes ! (Score:5, Funny)
After that, 32 software engineers in India put in many hard hours over a 4 year period to "crack the code" of MS Office. Thats like 4 years of tedious mathematical analysis
After 4 years of this seemingly endless and fruitless intellectual struggle
This new equation is fed into the computer banks and the hard disks begin whirring away for one more time.
Some hours later, as the sun is well on its journey into the sky, the hard drives stop whirring. Everyone in the team gathers around the green glow of the monitor in the dead silence, the sweat glistening on their faces drawn tight with exhaustion and tension. After a moment that lasts a lifetime
C O D E - C R A C K E D
appear in capitals on the monitor, and the dusty old dot matrix printer begins printing out the secret Microsoft Office code word. But admist the jubilation, the computer hackers remain calm
Barely hours after breaking the secret code, the new modified code word is overlaid onto Microsoft Office and fed back into the computer. The hard drives whirr noisily one more time, and then the result appears on the screen. They now have Microsoft Office working as an online application !!!
Im glad that the times newspaper in the UK decided to print this story
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Is here [live-documents.com]
See for yourself.
You must have better karma than Sirch [slashdot.org], because he linked to the exact same page, only /. thought it prudent in his case to warn me of the url.
Here it is: the Live Documents website [live-documents.com].
Odd.
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