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)
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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.
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?
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.
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
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There is a good chance that Lindows would have prevailed in the European cases if it had appealed. The decision in the Netherlands, for example, was based on the court's holding, without expert testimony, that "windows" was not a generic term in Dutch, which is empirically false. It is true that the Microsoft suits were more of a hassle than Lindows wanted to deal with, but it is far from clear that Lindows had an untenable legal position outside the US.
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You will find none whatsoever.
Now, try to invalidate a trademark when mark holder comes in with that bit of evidence (replicated in television scripts, radio scripts, advertisements, and other publications.) Wear earmuffs, though, since t
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C//
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Lindows was about to invalidate the windows trademark in the US, after that it's all dominoes.
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The question is not whether it's a "threat" to the trademark, that begs the question of whether the trademark is valid to begin with. In any case, the name of the application is "Microsoft Office", not "Office". If you have installed it,
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I never saw one of them.
Anyway, ReactOS can't be renamed Linux because Linux is a valid trademark. It is far from clear that you'd have troubles if you name "Online Office" your online office suite, because it isn't clear that office is a valid trademark.
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.
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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.
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It is confusing though. When I went to the download page, all I saw was the client and the system requirements was windows with MS office 2000/xp/2003.
I'm not entirely sure that this isn't a some web extention for Office or if it is an entire office sweet. The article and sumery suggested it was a different office sweet but I'm not entirely sure after visitin
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.
Re:Office Live Documents? Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
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The only thing these guys did was add the word "documents" to it.
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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
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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.
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Lame, indeed.
Next...
Words only. (Score:2)
I suspect that the Linux and Mac stuff is a phase two thing.
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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>
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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.
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Well, the offline synchronization looks promising - even if you only treat it as a free online backup and remote access tool. If they manage to create a common OS independent office suite that really is transaprent to users (in terms of 100% file
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]
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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.
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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.
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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
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Okay, that's fucking stupid.
OK so you'd rather have "Clippy" (or his equivalent) pop up with v14gR4 ads every 30 seconds?
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Everybody around here would stop if we lose network connection. People wouldn't even be able to log on their systems and access their documents.
So, please, explain why office software is that big a deal.
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
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Are you trying to have both sides of the arguement by yourself? Either it's a useful product or its not. If its a not a valid product then micronsoft moving into the market has no affect w
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They're doing it to be bought by Microsoft.
Buying a small company out is much easier than actually competing with it. Business 101.
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When will people realize that not everything that can be done online should be done online. The article is very light on details one of the big reasons I won't even try Google Apps is because all the files are located on Googles servers and I wouldn't have any control over them. The only detail the article does mention is that this "Live" office has Office 2003's look and feel. OpenOffice is free and has Office 2003's "look" and yet it hasn't replaced MS Office, google apps is free and hasn't replaced MS O
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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.
Adobe is already planning [news.com] on taking Photoshop online.
The Truman Show (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Truman Show (Score:5, Funny)
The kids, they love to be stalked.
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Many posters have responded along the lines of "I'd never trust my data to an online servce!". But there's a case to be made that for the average user online data is safer than having it on their PC.
Before you shoot me down, think about all the viruses, trojans, spyware you've cleaned off friends PCs, and about the number of times you've asked "When did you last backup?" with a sinking feeling. Wouldn't it be great to be able do a quick Ubuntu install and be totally confident they'll be working on their d
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If you're the director of a company and you store confidential information on one of these services and your company loses money as a result of someone gaining access to that confidential information, you will likely be sued into bankruptcy.
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Wrong!
Google Docs and Gmail both use HTTPS if you force it to. The easiest way to do so is use the Firefox plugin CustomizeGoogle. Hard way is to remember to type https:/// [https] links to Gmail and Google Docs. Either way, you are golden.
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By default it is insecure.
Therefore it is insecure.
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It even has a familiar mnemonic so you
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I for one haven't even progressed to naked mindspace photos. Link please.
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Wake up! In many countries, governments with a disregard for privacy and human rights are working on (or have already implemented) legislation that forces you to help police decrypt your stuff or go to prison [theregister.co.uk], allows the police to use malware to search through your computer's harddisk [wikipedia.org] and let's not forget all the illegal wiretapping / breaking into homes by police around the globe.
T
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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.
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2) At work I already have a computer with all the tools I need.
3) Collaboration sounds nice, but so far I have yet to find the instance where I have to do that, at the same time (except for our timesheets, but that works in Excel out of the box already. (you can set an excel sheet to 'share with others', and they can edit the same document at the same time as you.)
4) TANSTAAFL. Right now it's free
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
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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..
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I think whether you are in the love or hate camp really depends on your monitors resolution. My friends that are running the 1400 and better flat panels seem to love it, while I have found that on my 1024X768 laptop that it just sucks up too much real estate.
Actually you don't lose any real estate [msdn.com].
Does anyone know of a way to resize the ribbon real estate without getting rid of it entirely? I wouldn't mind learning the button layout just so I can walk folks through it when I have to work with it,but I am not going to give up 25% of the screen just for a control bar.
Well you can minimise it (ctrl-f1 or right-click 'Minimise the Ribbon') which leaves only the tab headers and hides the ribbon itself until you click on them or start using ribbon command key shortcuts. Don't know about scaling it.
Do you consider Amazon.com a retail store? (Score:2)
Conveniently forgetting it's the only Office suite you can buy in a retail store...
Amazon Best Sellers in Office Suites
1 MS Office Home and Student 2007
2 MS Office Home and Student 2004 [OSX]
8 MS Office Home and Student 2008 {OSX]
13 Word Perfect X3 Office
15 OpenOffice.org 2.2 [79 cents on CD-ROM]
16 Word Perfect X3 Office Home
34 Star Office 8
MS Office 2007 holds seven of the top 25 slots in Office Suites.
iWork 2008 is #11 in s
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...
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This utopian society may soon be reality for most of us.
I have news for these people, internet connections go down, servers crash, on-line servers get hacked. Laptops get stolen, hard disk drives break down, viruses can destroy your data... Data on some online provider's disks is generally better protected, the real danger is that provider or the company hosting it might go broke
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True, but why are we even talking about the poor/starving/3rd world population when we are arguing about new technology? But since you brought it up - do you think that people in 3rd world countries will be more likely to have laptops/desktop PCs capable of running Office 2007, or low-power devices connected to the internet?
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and the better off residents in the USA will using Vista to get their AOL.
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Does that mean the world population will suddenly grow to 606 billion people, or that most of the third world countries will be extraterrestrial?
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I have news for these people, internet connections go down, servers crash, on-line servers get hacked.
You can't build the future in the present. If I show you a future that you need, the fiber will come. Twenty years ago the lucky ones had 1200 bit per second modems, and paid $12 per hour (on top of any long distance charges) to connect online to bulletin boards
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Appliance manufacturers seem to think we are living in a utopian society, with free, reliable electricity everywhere. Those silly bastards.
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.
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Methinks that's a bit of Indian understatement at work there. :-)
Why do I say this? Consider the About Us [live-documents.com] page:
Google docs was there from the beginning (Score:2)
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.
-1 Troll (Score:2)
So what's stopping MS? (Score:2)
Likely Story... (Score:2)
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.
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They're actually better by being consistent.. (Score:2)
The moment some Open Source heda comes up with a decent alternative for
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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