Microsoft Office Live: Why even bother?

Recently, I had the opportunity to trial Microsoft Office Live. I assume this product was launched to be a competitor to Google’s increasingly competent line of online collaborative editing tools, but if that’s the case, it has missed the target so completely that I’m shocked they didn’t scrap it and start over.

First, Microsoft use user-agent sniffing to reject people that are not using their blessed shortlist of “approved” platforms. That means that, despite going through this once before with ActiveX in the beginning of the decade, Microsoft still have not learnt that the whole point of a Web application is to be platform- and device-independent. By faking the user-agent on my Linux machine I am able to log in, only to be greeted with a read-only version of a spreadsheet that another user had already uploaded.

At the time, I assumed that my inability to make any changes to the spreadsheet was caused by my use of a “non-approved” platform, so I left and didn’t return. But today, one of my friends running IE8 on Windows told me that actually, no, this is the way it works on all platforms. The only way to edit documents in Microsoft Office Live is by owning a copy of Office; clicking “Edit” downloads the original document and opens it in Microsoft Office.

If Microsoft think that Microsoft Office Live is going to rival the Google Docs platform in any way in its current incarnation, I worry about their judgement. The reason that Google Docs is so popular is because it is always available, on any platform, for free. You can click a link and be editing a document within your browser in less than 5 seconds. Microsoft Office Live, on the other hand, requires you be using an “approved” platform, that you own a copy of Microsoft Office if you want to edit documents, and that you open a separate application whenever you want to make an edit to a document that’s been uploaded. In addition, Microsoft Office Live only offers a primitive checkout system for document changes; Google Docs, in sharp contrast, offers live collaboration with multiple parties with no need to block others from making changes simultaneously.

I’m sure that Microsoft sees Google as a huge threat to their core Office business, but if they want to compete effectively, this is not the way to do it.