Google Documents / Office Alternative - Live Documents Is Official

Looks like its is official Google Documents has yet another competitor, it's all over the web with posts from:

From ZDNet - Live Documents enters the Office suite ring | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com:

Sabeer Bhatia was the co-founder of Hotmail, the Web email service Microsoft acquired for $400 million in 1998. Now, Bhatia wants to bite the hand that fed him. He formed a new company, InstaColl, and is joining Zoho, ThinkFree, Google, Yahoo (Zimbra), Adobe and lesser know others in the effort to squish Microsoft Office with a new suite and complementary collaborative component, Live Documents.

Live Documents is a set of Flash-based Office 2007-like applications and also embeds collaborative capabilities and adds online/offline synchronization into Microsoft Office documents.

Bhatia said, “We are just a few years away from the end of the shrink-wrapped software business. By 2010, people will not be buying software. This is a significant challenge to a proportion of Microsoft’s revenues. .....

From Read/Write Web - Live Documents Enters Web Office Market With PR Bluster - Embrace & Extend its Motto:

Indian company InstaColl today formally launched Live Documents, a mini-office suite of products similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Live Documents has already received plenty of press coverage, mainly because it was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia - the man who famously sold web mail service Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998.

Live Documents was built using RIA technologies including Flash and Flex, which the company claims gives it a "user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications." In its launch announcement, Live Documents is being heavily positioned as a Microsoft Office competitor - and complement. On the latter, the company says that "Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications." There is also offline access.

It's also clear that Live Documents is leveraging the Microsoft brand - from the "Live" brand name, to the claim that it has a “Services plus Software” approach (Microsoft's calls this "software plus services").

From TechCrunch - Live Documents To Break Microsoft…We’ll See:

New product press releases unencumbered by the complexities of releasing actual software set off alarm bells. And when those press releases are so boastful as to suggest that the (unlaunched) product can hurt a competitor’s $20 billion revenue stream, the alarm bells get much louder.

So with alarm fells screaming, Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia announces he’s going to war with Microsoft by (someday) launching an online version of Office. The fact that Bhatia got rich when Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million in 1997 only adds additional drama to the story.

The as yet unlaunched product, called Live Documents, will be a Flash based online suite that competes with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The company will also release plugins that work with the desktop Office software that lets users store and collaborate on documents online.

If this sounds a bit like Google Docs and Zoho, that’s because it is. The differentiating factors for Live Documents, besides the fact that it’s built on Flash (Google Docs and Zoho are Ajax applications), is that they are promising feature matches with Office 2007 and they have the offline plugin component

And finally from Download Squad - Live Documents, the new online documents competition:

With more and more users building documents in web based applications, we were starting to think the market belonged to a handful of new companies like Zoho, ThinkFree, and a little upstart called Google. But it looks like there's another serious contender in the online Office space.

Live Documents has a strong pedigree. The service comes from the guy who created Hotmail before Microsoft purchased the webmail service. Live Documents are flash based office applications that have the ability for collaboration and online and offline syncing in a MS Office based environment. Applications are similar to Microsoft's traditional Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but are built using Flash and Flex so that any user on any system can view and edit at will in a richer multimedia environment. If the web portion doesn't do anything for you, the desktop client might with its offline abilities. It wraps up MS Office through a plug-in and embeds collaboration options into them as well, making it possible for multiple people to edit documents at the same time keeping them secure and allowing for revision controls.

Live Documents is not currently live, but you can request to try out their office solution on their website. We are awaiting an invite, and will report back if it's a worthwhile contender when we actually see it in action.

Looks like all the Online Office Competitors already have or will so have an offline, Gears type capability so who wins in this competition will be up to who comes up with the best mix of features, interface and last but not least marketing power. Google of course has the edge on marketing power but I wouldn't count out the competitors just yet.

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