It’s hard to know how seriously to take this, but, as Matt Asay points out, Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bhatia on Wednesday formally launched a web-based version of Microsoft Office called Live Documents. (An earlier, less ambitious version of the service was profiled by TechCrunch last year.) Asay dismisses Live Documents, saying, “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.”
He has a point. At first glance, the service, which is free for individuals but carries a subscription fee for companies, does look like just another online Office substitute, following belatedly in the path of Google Apps, Zoho, and the rest. But there are three things that make Live Documents interesting:
1. It’s not just an alternative to Office; it’s a knockoff of the Microsoft package. Live Documents copies the Office 2007 interface and feature set. Bhatia says his company, InstaColl, spent four years “break[ing] Microsoft’s code so that they could replicate it online,” according to a report in the London Times. The Bangalore-based, SoftBank-backed company, which is not lacking in chutzpah, thanks Microsoft itself for paving the legal way for the clone: “InstaColl said that it was not infringing copyright because of a legal ruling that concluded that it was not possible to patent the ‘look and feel’ of a computer interface. Microsoft itself was instrumental in setting the precedent. In 1994, it won a lawsuit brought by Apple for copying graphics from the Macintosh operating systems for use in Windows.”
2. Live Documents includes an optional plugin that integrates the online service with installed copies of Office. You can, in other words, use Live Documents as a standalone web service or as a web extension to your existing copy of Office.
3. Most important, this is a service launched in India by a successful Internet entrepreneur who has considerable prominence in the country, thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of Hotmail in 1998. The introduction of the service has been widely covered by the Indian press. Needless to say, India is a vast and largely untapped market for Microsoft and other software firms. Should a web-based, non-Microsoft version of Office gain traction there, it would be a big headache for the company.
What remains to be seen is whether Live Documents is any good. During the service’s introductory period, you need an invitation to use it – and I have yet to see any first-hand reviews. At the very least, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft has any response to the copying of its Office interface by an upstart competitor.
UPDATE: After further consideration, Asay says that Live Documents “is much more interesting than I had originally supposed.” He’s signed up for an account, as have I.
Zoho is India based too, by the way. I guess it is about time Indian IT vendors moved up the value chain from their current labor-cost arbitrage business models.
You are absolutely right that India and other emerging markets don’t have entrenched incumbents in IT, so they are very much up for grab.
Thanks for the mention, Nick. The Live Documents team responded to my original post with some additional, interesting information. It’s sounding more credible to me now. I posted their comments here.
Briefly, it’s a full Office suite, not just Word (as I, though not you, had mis-reported). It’s also highly additive to existing Microsoft Office installations, rather than being a pure replacement there of. This makes it much more useful and disruptive.
I still believe that email, not an office suite, i s more akin to the future of collaboration, but this seems like a reasonable step in the right direction.
The main problem with reverse engineering MS office file formats it that MS periodically restructures them to prevent the kind of pouching. All MS has to do is make a subtle change in the Word doc format and SoftBanks four years of work goes up in smoke! Don’t believe me? Open StarOffice, create a new writer document and then click the tab for document type. You will see about six different versions of MS Word documents, all incompatible, and you cannot even open a Word doc made in Vista at all! MS Office products dominate because a lot if IT jobs are tied to it them in government and large corporations; server based ones would destroy them. That’s the reason the Sabeer hasn’t been found dead floating in the Ganges with a W tattooed on his forehead! However, its been a decade since web based document management suites were invented here in the US, funny how it took that long for someone in India to come up with a “knock off”. That’s cutting edge, guys! Keep up the good work!
Most people don’t need the functional depth offered by MS Office anyway, so where is the incentive to move to something like this? I suspect most people would be happy to just use Google Apps – it’s simple, free, sufficient and getting even better every day.
Don’t forget about the EU rulings against MS-they could be force it to open up its proprietary office suite file formats. Even worse, if just ONE US government department decides to go with Google Apps, it could spell the end of MS dominance in the office suite arena completely! One thing Google needs to work on is auto-correct, it really sucks – its slow, sluggish and frustrating! ;)
I think there is a common mis perception on how Enterprises use Office Suites. Enterprise users have Excel and Word as a frontends with complex and custom business logic, workflow and automation in front of large enterprise databases. They do not (like most SMB or SOHO users) use Excel for simple calculation and list keeping or typing up a resume. Products like ZOHO, gOffice and Live-Documents make sense as a replacement for that category of fly weight users where Excel is too feature rich and expensive.
It would take a large effort for products like Google Office (not just from Google but from eco system partners as well) to match the capabilities of Excel as a platform before companies start building critical finance and analytics apps on them. A lot of the technology required for online office suites to be true alternatives to MS Office are yet to be developed (the Browser architecture is old and archaic, complex and buggy AJAX libraries that cant elegantly scale etc).
One approach that a lot of Enterprise customers are taking towards starting to put together a Utility computing infrastructure is to use products from companies Atlantis Computing and Citrix to build and host virtualized applications in the data center and use the Web as a delivery and distribution platform to push those apps to users worldwide through a web browser.
Disclaimer – I work for Atlantis Computing.
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Chet Venkatesh:
>> I think there is a common misperception on
>> how Enterprises use Office Suites. Enterprise
>> users have Excel and Word as a front ends …..
>> of large enterprise databases.
I don’t see what would prevent the “knock-offs” form being used as knock off Execl or Word RDMS front ends. To me that would be even better: thin browser client, web enabled knockoff connected to my choice of backend database – MSQL? Cost of re-training – zero.