It is rather telling that Microsoft chose to unveil a major business services strategy on Sunday. Perhaps this is because it is not really that different to what we can do already. Shared workspaces is not a new idea. Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s Business Division says:
By combining elements of different types of software, this new generation of solutions can break through the boundaries between the isolated islands of information within many organizations, while also enabling people to connect easily and securely with partners and customers beyond the corporate firewall.
Sounds a bit like SharePoint doesn't it?
And I wonder what will happens if I attempt to access Office Live or Office Online documents from OpenOffice or Google Docs. I guess Microsoft has added some proprietary programming interfaces via its ASP.net programming model to prevent this.
Let's not forget, thanks to TCP/IP networking, I can choose to save and view a document on any server I have access to on the Internet, so long as I am granted the relevant firewall permissions. So what's new?
