Ray Ozzie on Web Office

SeattlePI.com has excerpts of comments made by Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie: “As far back as pre-bubble there was a company called desktop.com, but ever since that era, technologists have been trying to test themselves and see how much of the Office experience we could take up into a browser and make it usable in some form. And in that realm, yes, there’s Google Docs & Spreadsheets, there’s ThinkFree, Zoho, there are a variety of different instances of people taking the tools and kind of replicating them up into a Web environment. … In the pure Web model, the trade-offs are fairly substantial. You have to be online in order to use them. Depending on whose version it is, there are different feature/function trade-offs. But the way I approach it and the way I view the services opportunity related to productivity is really about more than just taking what’s on the PC and putting it up on the Web. I think there are high-level scenarios that if you consider you’ve got software on PCs, services in the cloud and devices, mobile devices, as the power that you can work with, and you try to envision the value of productivity, and what you’re trying to offer, you end up with a different result.”