The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Bhatia seems ultra confident he will succeed. He said that: "Live Documents is the new productivity suite for the Internet generation providing flexibility lacking in traditional software while retaining that which is important from the past and extending it with unique collaborative capabilities. I believe that Live Documents does for documents what Hotmail did for e-mail”.
Of course, there are many online Office clones available, whether from Google, ThinkFree, Zoho, Adobe and a number of others, all of whom want a piece of Microsoft's multi-billion dollar pie just as much as Sabeer Bhatia.
But Live Documents promises to give us the desktop features we expect in a web browser window, and help to break Microsoft’s dominance in a way that Google and the rest haven’t yet achieved in Office software sales - and it might also finally spur some of the competition to really take their products to the next level.
Adarsh Kini, Chief Technology Officer, InstaColl, said that: "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”.
Sadly, there aren’t even any screenshots to share with the public as yet, but if the marketing blurb can be believed, this looks like it will be the most ambitious and best Office clone yet.
If it works as advertised, and resonates with the public, a true response from Microsoft offering their own Office clone online could well make an appearance sooner rather than later.
When we are able to test Live Documents, we’ll post a report, but until then this latest launch has added a little bit of extra spice to what is normally the relatively boring world of the Office software suite, seemingly outdoing the rest with what could well be the first true killer online Office app.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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