Microsoft Faces Fight Against Online Office Rival 186
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.'"
Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
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: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.
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.
ummm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:And how is that different from Google Docs? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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
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Re:One thing missing... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:One thing missing... (Score:3, Informative)
Lame, indeed.
Next...
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]
Re:You saved $0.25 per document? (Score:3, Informative)
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 thing only has the 15 or so functions that our users should be using, and where appropriate they work the same way they do in other word processors. To be sure, this started out as an experiment - but it's an experiment that paid off. Our alternative options at the time (2001/2002'ish I think) were not good, and our tests with them didn't make happy users.
And, to be clear, I never set out to say this is the right solution for everyone - and likely less so now in 2007. And, of course, if your Word users are using lots of complicated functions, you'd be crazy to try to re-implement them all. I was countering the idea that an online word processor is infeasible in general.
Also, to be clear, I am not inexperienced with other alternatives. A few of our users need spreadsheets, so a couple years ago we looked into an OpenOffice based content management system. We got it working for the spreadsheets and got most of the application ties working, and as a test we tried to see whether the word processing users wanted to use it too. They didn't like it - too complicated, and if they wanted to use it at home they had to install stuff. And, for us, if we wanted to do customization, we had to delve deep into a fairly complicated project. It's still only used for a few spreadsheets, and the project was, on balance, a waste of time (which we're OK with - we may use it more later).
We also support another client that uses a forms based app with ties to Word (from around 1998). It works OK for the most part, but there's fairly often some problem and the breaks between apps make the UI fairly hokey. A month ago, they installed a Server 2003 update on a neglected server, untested, and everything died. Some "Word cannot open " error. Had to run a fix on every computer, and then fix some of the templates - lost a half day of work. Nothing major, but something that happens much less frequently for the online one (though, to be fair, Vista gave us some curveballs). I've spent a lot of time diggling with weird errors in Word templates, and Googling about odd problems.
In general, I get tired of the term "Not Invented Here". I hear it fairly often, especially when we get a new employee who's not used to actually writing software. I understand the idea that re-using tested software is often better than rolling your own, but I know a lot of developers who seem scared of developing anything. It's always "piece together 6 well tested, general purpose tools". We've had a few guys like that over the years, and their legacy usually lives on in the bad parts of the software, and the parts that don't work when we make a new app server because they require 12 packages installed to do simple crap (and where did we put the license key for this one? can we still download the old version of that one?).
If you have a manageably sized, specific need, quite often a homegrown solution will better meet your needs and will be easier to maintain for those needs going forward. Our company outpaces our industry fairly handily on technology, despite spending about the same. It's because we don't blindly write off options because they don't match some rule of thumb.