Sabeer Bhatia’s Instacoll Launches Live Documents!
Just yesterday we blogged about instacoll and sabeer bhatia’s claims of launching something soon that would be “Bigger than Hotmail”. Now the announcement has just come in and the reason there were almost 100 engineers working in the bangalore office of Instacoll is because they were working on an online office suite.
Sabeer Bhatia has announced the launch of Live Documents an online documents processor i.e. word, excel and powerpoint. Mr.Bhatia had this to say about Live Documents “It is very similar to what we did with Hotmail 10 years — moving the e-mail to web — we have taken the entire productivity suite and are running it online,”
Yes Mr.Bhatia! but at that time there was no Google nor was there Gmail and this time there is Google Docs. Also there is something called Zoho (another indian company) which have already mastered the art of building office applications for the web. Im not sure Mr.Bhatia knows about these if he does then he should realise that his application is a 3rd possibly 4th entrant in this space.
Though it may be the 3rd player it has an interesting feature of live syncronisation i.e. Any changes made on web or desktop side are automatically synchronised to ensure the desktop and Web versions are in sync. Currently Live Documents is Free to use for individuals but corporates would be charged a fee of $50 a year, or $10 for a month.
What is also interesting is the name “Live Documents”. Its almost as if the product is created to be sold to Microsoft! I wont be surprised if in the next 6 months the acquisition does happen. After all a lot of microsofts online business did kick off after its hotmail acquisition! Also Microsoft still doesn’t have online versions of its office suite and is beaten to that game by the likes of google and zoho so its only natural that it looks at an acquisition rather than going through the pain of building an application themselves.
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Is this company around? Sabeer Bhatia is making a fool of himself.