Live Documents
Sabeer Bhatia, famous for co-founding Hotmail and selling it to Microsoft for US $400 million, has recently announced the release of Live Documents, an online Office service.
Although not quite live yet, the site will accept requests for an invitation to join the private beta program of its technology preview.
Live Documents is a suite of on-line Office applications, built using technologies including Flash and Flex, which offer functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The applications allow users to edit and view documents using a web-browser on any operating system.
The suite is also available as a desktop client application that enables offline access to documents. Although not entirely clear from information available on the web-site, this appears to be provided via a plug-in to Microsoft Office applications which converts them to web-enabled smart clients.
There are currently at least 3 players in this market segment viz Microsoft, Google and Adobe. It remains to be seen whether, or by how much, this new entrant will create an impact.
BTW whatever happened to Office Live Workspace, which is the equivalent offering from Microsoft? Perhaps this will provide a spur for them to open it up a bit more . . .
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