Live Documents - Made “By” India

If you look at InstaColl’s company profile the mission statement on their website deliberately reiterates the difference between “Made in India” and “Made by India”.

InstaColl is a Bangalore-based start-up founded with a singular vision - establish the first “Made by India” product brand that is globally recognized and appreciated.

Please note that is “Made by India” and not just “Made in India” - half the software products in the world are probably already developed to some extent in India but can you name even one product brand made by India…no? We thought so - this is therefore our raison dêtre…

Sabeer Bhatia & Co spent four years reverse engineering Microsoft Office code and yesterday they launched the web based version of Microsoft Office called Live Documents. I guess I’ll leave it for interpretation whether reverse engineering someone else’s code falls under the “Made In…” or “Made By…” category . In any case there is a litany of opinions and comments on the blogosphere not surprisingly directed at Mr. Bhatia given his background i.e co-founder of Hotmail which was eventually sold to Microsoft thus making him a boatload of cash, somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million. People like Matt Asay dismissed the product even before taking it for a test drive only to be embarrassed by responses to his post from the Live Documents team. Asay then offered a mea culpa for jumping the gun in response to Nick Carr’s post.

I think some folks are missing the big picture here. IMO this is not about knocking off Microsoft’s Office suite or competing with Google Docs. It’s really a dose of good old fashioned American capitalism. Whether Live Documents will become a success or not remains to be seen and this will depend largely on how good the product is. However what really matters is InstaColl saw an opportunity and decided to do something about it when nobody else did including Microsoft.

Designed to help consumers avoid expensive upgrades and to foster collaboration on a secure internet platform, Live Documents matches features found in Office 2007, the most recent version. It will be given away to individuals with 100MB of free data storage space per user. Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft’s licensed technology.

Existing Office customers were slow in upgrading from Office 2003 to Office 2007 mainly because of the $400 upgrade cost. IMO InstaColl saw that opportunity and decided to provide a solution that not only addressed all of the Office 2007 features but they are also throwing in the collaboration feature into the mix so customers can share documents online. BTW the collaboration feature comes in two flavors, one for customers who use the browser based solution and the other for users who want to continue to use Microsoft Office by downloading a client which will be installed as a toolbar button and allow document collaboration online sans a web browser.

At the end of the day the only thing that is going to matter is how good of a product Live Documents is. I have signed up for the invitation and I’m hoping to get a chance to test drive it. This will be the determining factor if they want to give Microsoft a run for their money and not Sabeer Bhatia’s past successes nor the fact that the software was “Made in India” or “Made by India”. I think your average customer could care less as long as the software performed to their expectations.

[digg=http://digg.com/microsoft/Live_Documents_Made_By_India/blog]