Microsoft's Software + Cloud strategy

To be frank, Microsoft sucks at it. I've used Google Docs in the past to collaborate on documents. It was straight forward and easy to use.

Just now I thought I'd try using Skydrive for collaboration. Using Office 2010, two of us opened a document edited it and tried to save it. The upload manager got angry and said the file was locked by another user. We alternated closing the file to see if we could save it to skydrive again, we couldn't. We tried to discard the changes, but that failed because it said the file was open. That was horribly too complicated for something that should have been so simple.

So I decided to try Docs.com out. It seems more feature complete than Skydrive. We tried editing there, but that failed instantly...

I clicked the "Open in Word" button on the website, and was presented with

I smell a failure coming along. Almost everyone knows how to use your competitors offering. No one has heard of Skydrive let alone the features for collaboration built into them. They shouldn't even bother.

http://workspace.officelive.com/en-us/

I agree on this, sadly. I have tried Officelive and it is far from what I expected. The editor is extremely lack in features. And to open the skydrive folder takes a long time in Office2010 before I can share. I really don't know what they are doing. After this long while, the offering is really lacking IMO.

magicalclick said:

I agree on this, sadly. I have tried Officelive and it is far from what I expected. The editor is extremely lack in features. And to open the skydrive folder takes a long time in Office2010 before I can share. I really don't know what they are doing. After this long while, the offering is really lacking IMO.

and add these stuff http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/550598-Microsoft-online-services-need-to-be-much-more-clear-and-centralized/ to the whole package and it has fail all over it.

Although, I think they are doing it on purpose and it's some business/politics behind all this.

Microsoft is a strong company, I think when "they are ready to go online" for real, we will see some serious change in things real quick.

turrican said:

magicalclick said:

*snip*

and add these stuff http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/550598-Microsoft-online-services-need-to-be-much-more-clear-and-centralized/ to the whole package and it has fail all over it.

 

Although, I think they are doing it on purpose and it's some business/politics behind all this.

 

Microsoft is a strong company, I think when "they are ready to go online" for real, we will see some serious change in things real quick.

ever see "beer wars"? with the rise in popularity of micro/specialty brews, the big 2 american beer makers have been flooding the market with cheap sub-par "craft" beers, turning the general population off to the idea of craft beers. The difference is that MS's name is all over their online offerings whereas the consumer would have to dig a bit to learn that the crap pumpkin ale they just bought was actually cranked out by budweiser. in other words, i doubt ms is making their cloud services suck on purpose (reportedly.... i have yet to even look at them).

turrican said:

magicalclick said:

*snip*

and add these stuff http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/550598-Microsoft-online-services-need-to-be-much-more-clear-and-centralized/ to the whole package and it has fail all over it.

 

Although, I think they are doing it on purpose and it's some business/politics behind all this.

 

Microsoft is a strong company, I think when "they are ready to go online" for real, we will see some serious change in things real quick.

I think the problem is that this isn't a strategy; it's a reaction. That's why folk can't make head or tail of it.

I think Office 2010 will be working better with the online services later this year, when they launch the OneNote stuff that's when a lot of the collaboration features are going to be coming online.  But I didn't think Word was getting collaboration anyway.

At the moment it is not good.  And SkyDrive isn't running the newest version of the Web Apps either.

lilich said:

Intelman, thanks for the bug on Docs. 

 

Can you let me know a few things so we can track this down.

- machine (PC/Mac/Linux)
- browser

-link to the file or filename

 

 

Windows 7 machines using Firefox 3.6.3.

http://docs.com/ZR1

Oddly enough it happens in IE 8 as well, but prompts me to download the file after the error. After that the site is renderd useless and errors appear on the page.

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.3)
Timestamp: Wed, 19 May 2010 14:41:51 UTC

Message: Invalid argument.
Line: 22
Char: 5
Code: 0
URI: http://az2703.vo.msecnd.net/cdn/Scripts/WACResize.js?v=1.0.3785.31846

Message: 'window.document.documentMode' is null or not an object
Line: 2
Char: 101994
Code: 0
URI: http://docs.com:8080/_layouts/inc/WordViewer/WordViewer.js?bn=1447301010

Message: 'window.document.documentMode' is null or not an object
Line: 2
Char: 101994
Code: 0
URI: http://docs.com:8080/_layouts/inc/WordViewer/WordViewer.js?bn=1447301010

The filename is "The operation of a distillation column is quite energy intensive"

Ray7 said:

turrican said:

*snip*

I think the problem is that this isn't a strategy; it's a reaction. That's why folk can't make head or tail of it.

 

If I understand you correctly, you mean MS is a follower rather than a leader in this case and if so, I think you are probably right on the spot regarding this.

turrican said:

Ray7 said:

*snip*

If I understand you correctly, you mean MS is a follower rather than a leader in this case and if so, I think you are probably right on the spot regarding this.

For sure. Google's web sharing works great, but the functionality is so crappy compared to Word that the standard way of sharing files is still via emailing copies back and forth. It gets pretty messy.  Microsoft's solution is not ubiquitus enough yet, and probably will never be , I bet a year from now if I ask my peers to collaborate on a report using docs or webapps, they wont know what they are or how to use them:(.

I have not given up complete hope for Microsoft, but the initial state of things plus Microsoft's past performance leads me to believe they're doomed.

#1 No current plugins for older versions of Office, so the integration might be confusing for some.

#2 People on campus rarely know about skydrive, let alone the integrated webapps. The interface is not clean and simple enough. There also is no easy distinction between Group Skydrives and Personal Skydrives.

#3 Saving the document to the web is not that fast. It makes the program hang for a bit. This is probably because you have to browse Microsoft's exposed remote share. It is pretty damn slow. That will be perceieved as a bug for sure.

My only other hope now is Google somehow does something amazing with DocVerse.

http://www.docverse.com/

tina10 said:

Hi intelman.  I got the scoop from the SkyDrive team and that they currently don’t support co-authoring, but the Office team is looking at enabling that scenario in the future.  I hope this helps.

 

 

Tina

Thanks for checking it out Tina. Was co-authoring never meant to be used with Skydrive? The marketing and videos make me believe it was. Perhaps you are saying it is just becaus it hasn't been enabled yet?