It is usually not a good strategy to be always chasing the competition. Let's hope they do a better job than there previous web application ventures like the downloadable app needed for the Live Search incentive tracking.

Who wants to bet we see an ActiveX plugin? ;-)

Who wants to bet we see an ActiveX plugin? ;-)

And you can almost bet it will rely on M$-$ilverlight.

... I wonder how they'll deal with all the NON-SGML characters and non-standard HTML in the desktop office suite. I spend more time editing out the left/right "curly" quote marks, apostrophe's and long hyphens from Word documents people send me to post on the web than anything else that needs editting. Just yesterday, I marked up about 1000 word document, a form, some CSS, and when I was done, I ran it through the validator. Of the (16) errors, only two were typos on my part, (I put two closing tags on a bold).. the other 14 were imported #%$^#4@#$%@%^ from MS-Word... arghhh!

Really hope it is a true web app that supports lots of browsers, and not some activex stuff.

The Silverlight plug-in is just as innocuous as FLASH or any other plug-in in my book. It's probably safe to say that some sort of plug-in would be involved to achieve the sort of functionality offered by an Office application. I'm guessing it would be difficult to achieve the same functionality with only Ajax.

Their first attempt only allowed you to view office docs. This one promises create and edit. I suppose the third iteration will allow print and save?

They are busy guarding the barn door while the cows are being airlifted through the roof.

If they made it work with any browser on any platform, I'd applaud them, but you just know it's somehow going to try to tie us to their platform or a particular technology of theirs they want to protect/bolster. It's certainly their right to do so, but I'll argue, that's one of the reasons they are chasing the competition and not leading anything as far as their online offerings go.

but you just know it's somehow going to try to tie us to their platform or a particular technology of theirs they want to protect/bolster

Which is what I meant by mentioning Silverlight.

MS can't seem to accept anyone else dominating a software market segment. Adobe controls nearly all of interactive online graphics and don't forget the SWF/FLV video market -- which is huge and growing.

MS may get people to install Silverlight for Office charts, graphs, presentations, etc -- but I believe it's a sideways move to cut into Adobe's market. It's about the only way MS can get the Silverlight plugin onto a wide installed base -- that and shoving it down people's throat in their browser and OS.

Next: Silverlight in cereal boxes, a CD with a few "Requires Silverlight plug-in games".

Much better than relying on #$%$^! JAVA applets which memory leak all over the place due to the lazy programming. They come up again and again in the WSIWYG elements of CMS systems. I would rather use a .NET element that works or just a plain text edit box that I have to type the HTML in manually.