The co-founder of Hotmail has joined the rush to move office applications from the desktop to the web…
“The co-founder of Hotmail, the web-based e-mail service bought by Microsoft for $US400 million ($459 million) a decade ago, is challenging the American software giant’s core $US20 billion office desktop business…”
Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia has introduced a new contender to the growing field of web-based applications. Instant Collaboration Software Technologies (InstaColl), a Bangalore based company co-founded by Bhatia, unveiled its “Live Documents” on Wednesday, an application that allows users to access and work on their documents online using a browser, and collaborate and share documents in real-time with others.
“Bhatia describes his product as an online-offline Office suite of applications which he claims has all the features of Microsoft Office 2007 and is available online for free.”
“Apparently, Bhatia’s suite is somewhere in between Microsoft’s desktop-based suite and Google’s online suite.”
“Even power-users of Microsoft Office can use our service,” he added. Microsoft will not sacrifice their desktop software license business by offering a fully online office productivity service, which presents an opportunity for InstaColl, added Bhatia.
The software supports any browser that supports Adobe Flash and runs on any computer operating system, said Sumanth Raghavendra, chief executive officer of InstaColl.
Online documents can also be synchronized and worked with off-line, using a desktop client that wraps around an office suite running on the desktop, Raghavendra said. Live Documents automatically synchronizes all changes, the next time the user goes online. Users can work on the document in Microsoft Office when off-line, for example, and then the document will be updated in Live Documents for online collaboration, he added.
The Flash-based applications suite viewed via an Internet browser is just one of the means to use Live Documents. The product can also integrate within your existing Microsoft Office installation, adding online collaboration capabilities.
“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,” Bhatia said.
“From a technology and utility perspective, Live Documents offers two valuable improvements – firstly, it break’s Microsoft’s proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office and secondly, our solution matches features found only in the latest version of Office (Office 2007) such as macros, table styles and databar conditional formatting in Excel 2007 and live preview of changes in PowerPoint 2007.
Thus, Live Documents lets consumers and businesses to derive the benefits of Office 2007 without having to upgrade, said Adarsh Kini, Chief Technology Officer at InstaColl.
Once a Live Document is created, it can be shared with any other internet user, enabling collaborative editing of files. Permissions can be set to specify who can view or edit a file, and all changes are logged and synced with the desktop.
Live Documents uses Flash and Flex technologies from Adobe to provide users a better user experience than with the online office applications from Google, which are essentially stripped-down versions of Microsoft Office, Raghavendra said.
InstaColl is targeting both the office productivity market, which it estimates to be $20 billion this year, and the market for document management and collaboration software.
Kaushal Cavale, chief operating officer adds that Live Documents is designed to appeal both to Office users and to people determined to avoid Microsoft software.
“Live Documents provides a sophisticated productivity and collaboration solution for both sets of users – people who want to completely avoid Microsoft Office applications and those who wish to continue working completely within these tools – and the real power of our solution is that it lets both sets of users work well with each other rather than create two silos working independently,” he says.
Live Documents is similar to Google Apps, launched in February and used by companies including Proctor & Gamble, General Electric and Capgemini as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft.
However, Bhatia claims that his product is superior to Google’s in its range and quality, most crucially because it mimics Office 2007. Most of Office’s estimated 500 million customers have yet to upgrade from the 2003 version, while it is not available for Apple computers.
He said. “This will do for documents what Hotmail did for e-mail. Why spend $US400 on an upgrade when you can get it for free?”
The hosted service, which is currently available for technology preview at www.live-documents.com, is free for individuals but corporate users will have to pay. Corporate users can sign up for the hosted service, or run a license of the software on an internal server within the company, Raghavendra said.
The decision to offer the service free for personal use was prompted by the need to popularize the technology, Raghavendra said.
The application currently supports Microsoft Office on the desktop for users who want to work offline, but will also support OpenOffice.org, an open-source office suite, in a few months. InstaColl also plans to launch by that time, its own desktop client to offer its customers the ability to work offline.
InstaColl said that it was not infringing copyright because of a legal ruling that concluded that it was not possible to patent the “look and feel” of a computer interface.
Office 2007, the biggest advance in the system in ten years, took more than 2000 Microsoft programmers three years to develop. Thirty-two software engineers in Bangalore, India’s IT hub took four years to break Microsoft’s code so that they could replicate it online.
Sabeer Bhatia, a Stanford graduate, joined Apple where he met Jack Smith. The two colleagues came up with the concept of a web-based database entitled Javasoft. Eventually, they decided to create HoTMaiL (the uppercase letters spelling out HTML — the language used to write the base of a webpage). The service was launched on July 4, 1996 and in less than six months; the website attracted over 1 million subscribers.
Bhatia, who shot to prominence after selling Hotmail to Microsoft for a reported US$400 million in 1997, told reporters in Bangalore that the new application addresses a bigger market opportunity than Hotmail.
However, similar online office suite is offered by:
IBM offers Lotus Symphony, a suite of free desktop applications that includes document, spreadsheet and presentation software.
Google Docs is a suite of free web-based applications that lets users create, edit and upload documents, spreadsheets and presentations or create new ones from scratch.
Yahoo bought Zimbra — a start-up that specializes in online e-mail tools similar to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, key parts of the Office family — in September.
It is hard to say how this competition will turn out, but it is quite certain that the way users handle documents will soon change. In the end, the users are always better off when there are different solutions battling it out for their money.