Live Documents Challenging Microsoft in Online Office Market
December 5th, 2007 | Published in Technology
The competition for online office space hots up with the Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia planning to launch Live Documents via his startup company named InstaColl. Live Documents will offer all the functionalities of Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications, as per the announcement from the company.
In addition to the online office suite InstaColl also plans to launch the desktop client for Live Documents which will wrap around standard Microsoft Office desktop client, embed collaborative capabilities to the office documents, and convert standalone software to smart clients which can be accessed online so that multiple people can work on it at the same time.
It seems that the road may not be smooth for Live Documents as it user interface (as mentioned by TechCrunch and DigitalInspiration) closely resemble Microsoft’s UI so much that it is like a clone of Microsoft Office. I don’t know how Microsoft will take this, it may challenge the InstaColl in court or leave it if it believes its product is of superior quality which will make people to ignore Live Documents.
With Google and Zoho having released their online office products the market seems to become hot. I think that many more company will jump into the online office space and Microsoft will not be able to dominate the office space as it has done in the desktop market. So far, the online office utilities have not caught the imagination of online public.
Only time will tell how these companies hope to monetize the online office utilities. Open source can be a great competition and there are many chances of Microsoft failing like it did in the Server market which is dominated by open source products. I am a great lover of open source community and eager to know how the community acts in this segment.
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