Office in the cloud - free, but less than great?

Office Live is likely to make sense to consumers and businesses that are already running on Microsoft Software. For them, this feature has been lacking for years. In fact, its absence was felt so much that it possibly helped Google Docs entrench itself in the could, and in the hearts and/or minds of its users. Caught napping, you might say, specially for the last five years, where it can be argued that Microsoft's overconfidence or inability to see the changing landscape allowed the initial creeping wave of competition to become an all-inundating Tsunami.

Is it too little, too late? Maybe, if reports in the media and voices of people in the Blogosphere are to believed. Office Live presently, in public opinion expressed in blog posts and replies to articles by reviewers on tech sites ranks somewhere between a "Hmmm.." and “less than satisfactory.”  The enthusiasm that generally accompanies the launch of anything connected to Microsoft Office is, for the most part, absent.

Now, Microsoft has the arduous task to win these people back to its Office fold, which will not be easy given the skeleton it has up in the cloud. Most people have come to associate certain functionalities, say the 'word count' feature of Word, as “must haves”. The lack of these small-but-essential details is evidence of Microsoft's different view on what should be available for free, and what is exclusive to paying customers. Another key point is that Office Live saves files using the Office 2007 and Office 2010 format, recognizable by the conspicuous 'x' at the end of the file extension (.docx, .xlsx, etc.). Even though Microsoft's new XML-based formats have been around for almost the same duration as Google Docs, numerous businesses worldwide still use the (simpler?) old file formats, which could result in compatibility issues between files created online and being used later with an older version of Office. Thirdly, users who moved to the cloud since 2005 are likely to have at least some preference, if not outright loyalty, for their first cloud platform - Google Docs - just as die-hard Office users may prefer the online free version that took forever to arrive.

For now, this in-the-cloud dogfight between Google Docs and Office Live is yet to grow into a full-blown market war between Office and any other competing Office suite solution. It is, however, increasingly clear that Microsoft is, in the very least, rattled by the widespread and deep adoption of Google Docs and maybe even Oracle's Open Office. Though present losses may have been only of mindspace and not actual market share, Microsoft has indeed woken up and recognized the clear and present threat well enough to start offering some alternatives that may appeal to that its erstwhile audience, comprising people who have since migrated from its fold, even if its present free cloud-offering does not match up to the competition.