Live Documents - Google Docs killer? Think again.
By Erna Mahyuni
Sabeer Bhatia seems to be making a career out of making money from Microsoft. This is the guy who sold Hotmail to them for $400 million, after all. Now he wants a piece of Microsoft’s $20 billion Office pie - by coming up with his own online office suite and if he gets to hurt Google’s own Google Docs along the way, that’s no pain on his conscience.
Live Documents is Sabeer Bhatia’s new claim to tech prominence. He told The Times: "“This is a significant challenge to a proportion of Microsoft’s revenues.” Of course he would say that - he chairs the company behind it - InstaColl, based in Bangalore and part of the money from the Hotmail sale helped pay for Live Documents’s creation, admits Bhatia.
Users will be given 100MB of free data storage and companies can pay for the system, hosted either on a remote server or with InstaColl, for much cheaper than Microsoft’s alternative.
Besides Microsoft, Live Documents is also a direct competitor to Google’s Google Apps. And how does Bhatia claim to blow Google Apps out of the water? By saying that Live Documents is going to mimic Office 2007. And that it will allow online collaboration. In short, what other online apps are doing except they’re unabashedly copying a competitor’s interface to sell itself.
Call the lawyers. Oops, maybe not. InstaColl insists that the legal ruling that the "look and feel" of a computer interface cannot be patented will keep them safe from the baying legal aides. But isn’t the use of Microsoft’s pet "Live" moniker bound to cause at least a few hissy fits at Redmond, what with the Microsoft Live rebranding efforts this year?
The easiest way for Microsoft to proceed with this competitor is to just buy Live Documents. Wouldn’t the name fit right into the Live stable of products? But that would mean Live Documents’s ability to work with Open Office as well might just go out the window if that happened.
It’s too soon to say whether Live Documents will be a hit but when Office 2007 itself is yet to steal firm ground with offices who don’t have real reasons to upgrade from Office 2003, what could possibly make Live Documents an attractive proposition?
The problem is there are far too many free alternatives to Microsoft’s pricey Office, what with IBM’s Lotus Symphony and the ever-improving (but dangerously prone to bloat) Open Office. Until online collaboration via office suites becomes a must-have instead of a "nice-to-have", Live Documents has one heck of an uphill task.
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