Awesome. I'm a big fan of Google's feature-by-feature, slow-and-steady approach to competing with MS Office. Excel is the only application that I really miss since leaving Windows (Numbers & Mac Excel just don't feel right) and Google Docs is creepy up on it a little bit at a time.
Yeah, just got it the other day. Haven't gotten to play with it much yet. The one thing I have noticed is that it still doesn't play nice with Spaces. It does not respect that I disabled the option for "When switching to an application, switch to a space with an open window for the application." Drives me nuts.
Would Google Docs Spreadsheet PLEASE match and create the same shortcuts that are used is MS excel? It would be interesting to see if the engineers working on Google Docs Spreadsheet were ever MS Excel power users.
I tried Office 365 a few weeks ago. It's a disaster. I encountered:
1) Print Preview cleared the contents of my document
2) Sometimes input would randomly stop being accepted.
3) Loading the app took forever.
4) Numerous tab crashes.
5) The signup experience was a many-step cluster fuck. I was emailed a password and it said "Your new or updated account information." Seriously? You can't even get the words "Welcome" in your email subject?
6) Hilariously sparse UI. They forced the Ribbon UI on it, but they don't support all the features, so you spend a bunch of time trying to find things that you new were on a particular tab simply moved/resized to fill more space and not look so sparse.
To be fair, they don't officially support Chrome, but they do support both FireFox and Safari, so Chrome shouldn't be that broken.
At this moment, there is no experience or feature parity.
Many of the Live apps require IE + Silverlight to be collaborative (though I bet they do away with this, it seems MS is moving away from Silverlight for some things.)
Often when I mention this, an MS person says, "you don't need Silverlight + IE." It's technically true. It will revert to a "dumb" mode if you don't use that.
Also, some of the web versions, even w/IE + Silverlight, don't have realtime group editing. (Like the Word-esque app.)
This year they launched Office365, which they market as their cloud offering. It does have some hosted features, but the client they want you to use is not a web browser, but local copies of Office.
Web-based collab tools from MS are a moving target. They've switched their branding and strategy 4 times in the past two years. I don't think they're on the right track yet. They need to just bite the bullet and do a pure web offering. They know how to do it. It's not lack of ability. They just don't want to hurt the goose that lays the golden egg. Can't blame 'em. But then they can't blame us for diving deeper into Google Docs, which gets more interesting and flexible every week.
