Microsoft announced that Office Live Workspace (OLW) Beta has reached 1 million users. The online service launched 6 months ago and is meant to serve as an extension to Micrsoft's Office suite and is also (as some say) a direct competitor to Google's Docs and Zoho.
Kirk Gregersen, Director of Product Management for Office Live Workspace and Office Consumer and Small Business, said that as of a week ago, the public beta of Office Live Workspace was downloaded by one million customers. Also, the company announced that a final version of OLW will be released by the year's end.
Gregersen said that OLW users are tending to use the suite more as a collaborative tool for access to a single document. "Collaborative" is a bit of an overstated term, as OLW is not truly a collaboration suite. If two users open the same document at the same time and make edits, when saving, they will get an error message and have to decide whose edits will be scraped.
Coming down to OLW's competition with Google Docs or Zoho, a few other differences have to be pointed out as well. Microsoft's Office Live Workspace is at the moment only a way for users who paid for MS Office to share files with other people who have the suite. This might prove quite useful but it's not free, nor browser-based, as its competitors. Office Live Workspace has though a Web-based text editor, which is rather poor and doesn't support simultaneous editing, unlike Google Docs.
Microsoft officials also point out (in their opinion) that users don't really want to create large text file or spreadsheets on the Web, but rather prefer to do it on their PCs. Critics also say that many users turn to Google Docs because of Microsoft Office's high price. But this is yet to be seen, as with the launch of Chrome, Google is making Web applications (including its Docs suite) integrate more tightly with the desktop environment and behave like regular applications. Many companies already adopted Google's model of cloud computing and Chrome just makes it easier. The only problem is when the cloud comes crashing down, we'll all be stuck in the fog.
