Live Documents To Take on Google Docs and Microsoft Office

from Digital Inspiration by Amit

Sabeer Bhatia, who sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1997 for around $400 million, has now challenged the cash cow (read Office Suite) of the same company that made him a millionaire.

Sabeer has launched Office Live Documents - an online+offline Office suite of programs similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Like Zoho Office or Google Docs, Live Documents lets you create, edit and share Office documents in the web browser.

All your edits are automatically synchronized with all other copies of the documents.

And if you own a copy of Microsoft Office, you can download a Live Documents toolbar desktop client that makes it easy to upload documents from your Office programs to the Live Documents cloud (very similar to Office Live Workspace).

Other than uploading documents online, this Live Docs desktop client will also synchronizes all changes made to a document - either on the browser or on the desktop within Microsoft Office - to ensure that the most up-to-date document is available on both platforms.

Live Documents is done in Flex so should work on any system that has the Flash plug-in. Overall, Live Docs sounds like a good concept but they are definitely up against some heavyweights notably Google and Microsoft.

Request invite for Live Documents here. Official site: live-documents.com