Continued:

Few of the basic services provided by Office Live include a customer support website (along with e-mail addresses), which is fully managed and maintained by Microsoft, thereby giving the customer a hassle free web presence. Plus, it gives you access to someone with expert knowledge and software for document management, customer management and database management.

The other big news recently from Google was that it might be coming out with an online service that would rival Microsoft Office in most cases. Well, so far Google has kept mum on this issue and Microsoft has chosen to ignore it, but its Office Live seems to be an early attempt at taking on Google, and perhaps, slowly move things off the PC and getting them online.

In the near future, Google’s online office service would be more of a complimentary thing than a replacement for current office suite from Microsoft, which makes sense, as many people still don’t have broadband or meet other necessary requirements to completely replace the offline version.

As I see it, the problem for Microsoft is that even though Google created the whole online ‘Beta’ concept, its software has always been so great that it’s pretty much the final version except for a few nips and tucks. The billion-dollar question that I’d like to get answered, however, is: will Microsoft’s software + advertising model be as successful as Google’s to justify a sudden move to online application suites?