Ex Hotmail owner Sabeer Bhatia is the latest addition to the competition that is raging for Microsoft Office products. He is launching a free internet based office suite competing with Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel.Bhatia will use some of the millions that he has made selling the web mail service to devise the free, online product, ZDnet Netherlands reports.
The service is going to be called Live Documents. Key to the new product suite is that its internet applications can be used online as well as offline and that the programs are compatible with Microsoft office applications.
This enables users to freely open, edit and share documents both created on Microsoft applications and on Live Documents.
The technology was developed on the new developer platform of Microsoft competitor Adobe (Flash/Flex) and it operates on injecting Office applications by means of plug ins that can be operated via the internet.
Industry insiders say that the announcement won’t make Microsoft owners happy because Bhatia launched Live Documents after the sale of Hotmail, for which Microsoft paid 579 million a few years ago.