Office Live vs. Google Docs

The first thing that stands out when you log in to both services is the fact that Microsofts login page features a small advertisement. This is a good thing because users can hope that the service will stay free. Office Live features templates or blank “workspaces”, Google Docs has the folders. Microsoft’s service lets you upload any kind of file up to 25mb of size while Google limits its service to html, txt, doc, rtf, odt, xls, ods, tsv, tsb, ppt and pps. It misses the highly spread pdfs as well as pictures. Furthermore, the maximum file size allowed is 500kb or 10mb for presentations.

While sharing is available in both services, Office Live distinguishes between two different roles, editor and viewer. Versioning is supported by both.

Mobile access is available for Google’s solution while Office Live features comments and an activity overview.

IT (un-)enabled Group Projects

Four subjects – three group projects. A nightmare for most of the students, including me. Countless meetings, even more mails and a million different documents containing the work of several people. As a Business and IT student I am lucky to have some insight into solutions that make life easier, but unfortunately most of my fellow students (especially the business ones) use a laptop and Office 2003. That’s it. Versioning is a nightmare and real IT enabled collaboration is just not existing. I tried to foster the use of Office Live where groups and work together online – the perfect solution and it’s free (for now). But most people say we don’t need that and that it’s too complicated. Bull*?$!. It’s so easy and it safes time because you don’t have to meet every other day and follow up with countless emails. Especially as a student no matter what your major is, you should know and use the new solutions for collaboration. Everyone’s using Facebook, hardly anyone uses Google Docs or Microsoft’s Office Live.

The Empire Strikes Back!

During his last Microsoft CEO Summit Bill Gates pulled of a Steve Jobs’s like presentation (minus the presentation skills – notice how he has his back to the audience all the time) and introduced Microsoft’s Touch Wall, a huge interactive screen that let’s you browse through vast amounts of information by just using a huge screen with cameras and your hands as an input device. It’s like the iPhone on steroids! Although still in development this might be the future of corporate and educational presentations. To watch Bill Gates’ presentation, follow this link.

iSearch?

According to a report in the German edition of the Financial Times, Apple is working on a search engine to complement their browser and hardware devices like the iPhone. For me it’s the logical next step on the highway from everybody’s darling to Microsoft II. (Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Microsoft is bad, but their rep is) With their consistent strategy of closed systems a search engine is a money maker obviously missing in their portfolio. I bet the thing comes with awesome features such as:

- only 1 result if you search for Microsoft:

- you can advertise for US-$ 0.99 or € 0.99 because it’s almost the same, right?

- and obviously, the search results cannot be transfered to any PC…

Can’t wait!