Office.com Goes Live. Nothing To See Here.
Microsoft’s shiny new domain Office.com went live today. When they first bought the domain earlier this month, the blogosphere went crazy with speculations about what they would be doing with it. Google pretty much owns the whole cloud concept, being able to store and edit your documents right on the web, so it seems logical that Microsoft will have to enter this territory at some point if they want to remain relevant. From businesses to student, it just seems more logical and cost-effective to use free online tools rather than pay an arm and a leg to buy Microsoft Office. As far as Office.com goes, there are a few things at play here that need clarification.
As it stands at this moment, Microsoft does not have a web-based office suite. A look at Microsoft Office Live Workspace might have you thinking otherwise due to the wording on the homepage, though. Microsoft is giving you 5GB of free online storage for your Office documents. You can share these documents with others and organize them into folders. You can also access these documents from anywhere since they’re stored in the cloud. What you can’t do is edit those documents without already owning the Office desktop software. This is strictly an online storage solution and could pretty much be duplicated with something like Dropbox or Drop.io.
Right now, Office.com is a simple redirect to Office.microsoft.com, which is a site that helps educate you about office products and allows you to buy online. Nothing new or exciting here yet, but one can assume that Office.com will be much more interactive and useful once Office 2010 drops. Office 2010 will not only bring major changes and upgrades to the desktop suite, but will also provide light-weight web-based versions of their software. It will be interesting to see if this will be enough to pull users away from their precious Google Docs, or if Microsoft is too late in joining the party.
Category: web 2.0 | Tags: 2010, docs, google, Microsoft, Office
About the Author Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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It seems like an awful waste of effort. One thing that pisses me off about Microsoft is their seeming unwillingness to let their products talk to each other in the most straightfoward of ways. This is no different. Why bother sharing a document with someone online if I can just email them the document in the first place? It would be the same thing. And 5GB of storage for my work I do with Office is pretty low. I can blow through that in a few months time.