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The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson

Might Softricity enable a real Office Live?

Many people would like to see an online Office product. Bill Gates says that what people really want are online documents. That is, if Office is available everywhere (with a full-desktop license or through some other interface) then the users need to get to their documents from any machine.

Setting aside this storage requirement (and the services to support it) for a moment, making Office available everywhere requires one of two things:

  1. An Office Live strategy that actually includes Office products — meaning re-writing or newly written Office applications for the Web (which is apparently what Bill Gates doesn’t think people want); or
  2. Easy deployment of the existing Office desktop products anywhere.

Isn’t that what Softricity’s SoftGrid product does? From their site:

All applications are instantly available anywhere in the world – from a user’s desktop or a browser . . . whether the machine is the user’s own computer or a device shared by many users; or whether the user is on a high-speed or dialup connection — or even completely disconnected.

In addition, they claim that they can rapidly pull just the part of the application needed by the user (again, from their site):

. . . the Softricity client rapidly responds and “pulls” only the code necessary to start the program from a central Server — typically 20-40% of the total code. This happens without any degradation in functionality or response time; applications launch within seconds, based on application size and connection speed.

So, Office 2007 + Softricity = Office Live?

Is this the real reason Microsoft is buying Softricity? Is this the Office Live strategy? Mr. Ozzie, is this your online strategy? Robert, do I have it right?

Yesterday I wondered about the overlap between Softricity and FlexGo. So, alternatively, Office 2007 + FlexGo = Office Live.

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