Live Documents Enters Web Office Market With PR Bluster - Embrace & Extend its Motto
Indian company InstaColl today formally launched Live Documents, a mini-office suite of products similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Live Documents has already received plenty of press coverage, mainly because it was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia - the man who famously sold web mail service Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million in 1998.
Live Documents was built using RIA technologies including Flash and Flex, which the company claims gives it a "user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications." In its launch announcement, Live Documents is being heavily positioned as a Microsoft Office competitor - and complement. On the latter, the company says that "Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications." There is also offline access.
It's also clear that Live Documents is leveraging the Microsoft brand - from the "Live" brand name, to the claim that it has a “Services plus Software” approach (Microsoft's calls this "software plus services").
Continuing the 'embrace and extend' Microsoft theme, InstaColl CTO Adarsh Kini claims that Live Documents "break's Microsoft's proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office". He also says their service "matches features found only in the latest version of Office (Office 2007)", so giving users a reason to avoid upgrading their MS Office software.
It's clever marketing all round (or a "a shameless rip-off of the MS brand", depending on your pov!) and, as Nick Carr pointed out, India alone is a potentially huge market for Live Documents to take on Microsoft Office. Dan Farber also has a good post, giving context on the Web Office space in general - which is very crowded. But the problem is that nobody has yet seen the software in action, so it's difficult to say how Live Documents compares with the likes of Google D&S, Zoho, and ThinkFree.
Live Documents first surfaced in Sept 2006, and its current incarnation seems high on hyperbole and low on beta product action. So all we can do, like everyone else, is sign up to the invite beta and wait and see if the PR bluster will be backed up by the actual product.
2 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1788
FOLLOW RWW ON TWITTER
RECENT JOBS
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
I appreciate your objective coverage. I've read a few articles where some are already bashing this thing, but there's nothing really to bash yet. I actually think the embrace and extend concept they've detailed is kind of interesting and hope I get to try this thing out soon.
Posted by: Pete | November 23, 2007 9:37 PM
They have already got an client which is an Indian service company employing 5,600 people. And you are write in saying that they have huge market in India only where many services and outsourcing companies exist which employ large number of people. Google D&S has been a let down compared to for instance Zoho, and hence Live Document has fair chance of hitting success.
Posted by: Mayank Kumar | November 24, 2007 12:08 PM
I have seen the personal demo. It's better than they describe in PR...
Note: this comment is not from the RWW editor, but another Richard.
Posted by: Richard | November 24, 2007 4:06 PM
Hi Mr. MacManus, I’m a PR student at the University of South Florida and we are studying the growing popularity of blogging. If I wanted to get an influential blogger’s attention such as you, how would I go about getting my issue out to the masses?
Posted by: Sean | November 24, 2007 5:40 PM
Does Sabeer Bhatia have shares Quicktime? The logo is a Quicktime rip-off!!
Posted by: Reynder Bruyns | November 26, 2007 3:01 AM