Office live vs Google Docs

Microsoft just launched Office live (beta), as open competition to google docs.
The signup process for Office live is somewhat labourious  – and it could not be described as an easy process, however once you are logged into the service it is fairly simple.

There are 2 areas, if you like. The first is ‘Documents’ and here you can create new notes, lists, contacts, events and task lists. However you cannot currently create word, excel or powerpoint documents from here. This is definately where Google documents comes into its own as you can create this files from scratch online – and they only exist online.
There is a plugin that integrates Office live with your version of MS Office on your computer and once installed it easily lets you save and open documents to and from your workspace – making the online integration easy.

The second is Workspace which makes Office Live much more of an cross-breed of Office and Sharepoint , so you can use it to share your documents, but you can also create different types of workspaces and share task lists, and contacts. With Google launching google sites (a “Sharepoint Killer”), you can see that Microsoft will not have to make too many changes to create an online version of their Sharepoint. Whether they really will or not is another matter considering the Sharepoint business alone is worth into the billions of dollars annually.

Google Documents is definately more simple and in my opinion better for the person just wanting to work alone on online word processing or something, but the integration of Office Live with Microsoft office as well as other services like the skydrive make it a tough product to beat. The development of the online productivity tools over the last couple of years is definately exciting and it will be interesting to see who, out of Google and Mircrosoft take the upper hand in the current round of web domination!