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Microsoft conceived of Office Live Workspace, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, as a way to counter the easy document sharing selling point of the various Web office app vendors and started a public beta last December. Today Microsoft announced that the beta is now available worldwide albeit only in the English language.
There’s a nice feature comparison of Office Live Workspace with Google Docs at Read Write Web, but in checking out the bells and whistles, don’t overlook the key differentiator: “Files can’t be edited from within Workspace, but clicking on “edit” will open them up in Microsoft Office (of course).” For better or worse, Office Live Workspace is not a Web app for editing and creating office documents – it’s a free document sharing service for purchasers of Microsoft Office.
As I have observed previously, Office Live Workspace is a reasonable way for Microsoft to try to keep Office users on the reservation. The question is whether it is enough.
Microsoft announced Office Live Workspace in October and today started rolling out the public beta. The play here is for Microsoft to bring some sort of equivalent of the easy document sharing provided by Web-based office software competitors to the users of their cash cow desktop Microsoft Office software. They have done this in essence by adding new file saving options to Office applications and connecting them to a document checkout service running on the Internet.
That certainly provides the sharing function, but the early press reviews are generally less than ecstatic because Office Live Workspace doesn’t provide any of Web editing features of the Web-based competition. Past indications were that it would be a cold day in Hell when that happened, but Microsoft seems to be changing its tune as Erick Schonfeld reports:
Granted, this is version 1.0 of a beta. It will get better. One of the Microsoft execs who visited made it clear to me that the company’s goal is “bridge the gap between the online and offline world so that people don’t have to care where a document lives.” He also suggested online editing capabilities would be coming “maybe next year.”
As long as the Web editing functionality is tied to a registered copy of Microsoft Office, the Microsoft bean counters won’t care, but how long can they keep it tied up?
Microsoft has a fundamental problem competing with the online office application offerings like Google Docs in that they want to avoid cannibalizing their considerable Microsoft Office revenues. Therefore they have to try to emulate the desirable features of the online offerings while still requiring that the users have a fully paid up copy of Microsoft Office. That’s just what they did today when they announced “Microsoft Office Live Workspace, a new Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that lets people access their documents online and share their work with others.”
