
Docs.com (Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps + Facebook integration) - moserware
http://www.docs.com/
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danw
I am looking forward to sharing excel documents with my friends, they are
going to have so much fun reviewing my formulas and charts mapping out the
quality of our friendship.

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og1
Hmm, Microsoft using Facebook connect and not their Passport system,
interesting.

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mattmaroon
Seriously, it's time for MS to just buy Facebook. I really don't get why they
didn't snag it a year or two ago. They tried to spend 3x as much as it would
have taken (probably 2x now) to buy Facebook in order to buy Yahoo. Even if
Facebook never monetizes as well directly as Yahoo (which it quite probably
will) it'd be worth more in the grand scheme of things.

Facebook connect is everything that Passport tried (and largely failed) to be.
Yahoo+Bing is still only bordering on relevant in search, FB owns social
networking.

Put it this way, MSFT shares would rise greatly on the news of a Facebook
acquisition.

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maukdaddy
I'm not quite so sure share price would rise if they bought FB. Why? FB is in
no way related to any of Microsoft's core competencies. They would be much
better off buying companies that make online collaboration tools in order to
capture lost revenue from lost Office sales. How would FB help their bottom
line? Ad sales are nice, but at the end of the day MS is a company that makes
software - specifically Windows and Office. They should be focused on buying
companies that complement/replace that revenue stream.

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stanleydrew
The problem is that Windows and Office have little long-term potential as
profitable products. So what do you do when your core competencies become
obsolete? You have to get new ones. You could try really hard to learn new
ones, but when you have the money you can also just buy them...

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mattmaroon
People have been saying that for over a decade about Windows and Office, and
they've kept chugging along. I have a strong feeling the same will be true of
the next decade.

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Kilimanjaro
I hated scribd, now I hate docs.com. I don't like docs inside docs.

The web page is the doc, don't try to force another doc area with another
scrollbar to mess the whole UI experience.

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stanleydrew
What if there was no outside scrollbar? Would you still accept an inside
toolbar/menubar and 95% of the screen filled with a scrollable doc pane like
Google Docs (except perhaps with a little less toolbar)?

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aschobel
A bit disappointing that they are using Silverlight.

Not being able to use this on iPad seems to limit its utility.

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symesc
Agreed. Just fired it up in Chrome on my Mac and got the notification that
there is a new version of Silverlight available.

Back Button.

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heyadayo
Oh how awful that they used silverlight when you have it installed!

Funny that it works fine on linux/chrome+firefox without silverlight. They do
display the message "Improve Your Experience: Documents load faster and text
looks clearer when Silverlight is installed. [Install Microsoft Silverlight]"

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mixmax
Microsoft just doesn't get the web at all...

What exactly is the usecase for making excel spreadsheets that I can post on
my facebook wall? They even copied the "beta" thing from Google.

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sunchild
The facebook tie-in makes zero sense to me. Why isn't this aimed at business
users?

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stuff4ben
It seemed to work pretty well on my Ubuntu system without having Silverlight
installed. But there was a little notification that said documents would load
faster if it was installed. I'm always up for a good laugh and was wondering
how I would run that Silverlight .exe file on Linux. Well lo and behold there
is "Moonlight" which is available as a Firefox plugin that I'm guessing is a
way to allow Silverlight apps to work in Linux. Well now that I installed it
and restarted my browser, I can't open up any of the Word docs now. Oh well,
guess it's back to running Word in XP in a VirtualBox window.

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mattmaroon
Wow, that's pretty cool. I wish I had this when I was doing some fundraising
not long ago. I had to use docstoc, which seems the best of the web-based ones
at not mangling a powerpoint but is still kinda sucky.

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DrSprout
I heard you like walled gardens, so I put a walled garden in your walled
garden.

As if Facebook didn't have enough lock-in, privacy, and data integrity
concerns, they now want me to add this 'docs' thing to the equation, so that
literally all of my important information is in a walled garden I cannot make
private backups of.

Yes, I can make individual backups of the documents, pictures and messages,
but I can't view them in their original context, so they're worthless outside
of the garden.

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uggedal
It's behaving a bit too much like the desktop version:
<http://ugg.is/docs.com.fail.png>

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zzzmarcus
Yeah. I got an endless loader the first time. The second time I tried it
loaded, but when I tried to open a doc I was told I don't have the right
version of Office (Word 2008 for Mac).

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mustpax
Docs.com got auto-authorized to use my Facebook account the moment I loaded
the page. This is not acceptable, I should have been at least given an Ok,
Cancel dialogue to confirm linking my personal Facebook account with some
random document sharing service.

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mtarnovan
Their top menu looks very similar to scoutapp.com's

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arethuza
I wonder if this works on a Zune.... ;-)

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troels
Uhh .. It's like Google docs, but without that obnoxious "Don't be evil" part.

I wonder what they paid to get that domain?

