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Google Docs vs. Office Live -- A Fair Fight?

At the beginning of March, Microsoft debuted its Office Live Workspace, thought by some to be a direct competitor to Google Docs and other online office products. ReadWriteWeb has a great feature by feature comparison of the two products, but here's what stands out to me about the new Microsoft product: First, unlike Google Docs, you aren't actually working on documents inside the browser -- you are using the Microsoft Office products installed on your computer. So when you log into your workspace and click New Word Document, MS Word opens up a new document. When you save it, the document is automatically deposited on your workspace online. Because you aren't working on documents online, that means you can't work on a document at the same time as others with whom you are sharing it -- for them, the document will appear as "checked out." In one way, Office Live is simply a document storage repository with some collaboration features. You can share documents with others, and any changes made by any of the document users will be reflected in the online file. The ability to create separate "workspaces" (a little bit like Folders in Google Docs) is nice, and you can share separate workspaces with different people. But the whole process of essentially checking out documents to work on with your own software just seems a bit cumbersome to me. One other part of the process was problematic -- when I attempted to first use the Office Live product with Internet Explorer on my Vista PC, I was told that the product would work better if I upgraded to the new version of the Office Live Beta -- which turned out to be a 20MB download and lengthy install. In contrast, Google Docs just works. You go to the site, click a button, and you're working on a document. Office Live offers lots of other bells and whistles, but for plain ease of use I'm still a Google Docs fan.

Full post as published by Inter Alia on March 31, 2008 (boomark / email).