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.
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.