To try them: <a href="http://office.live.com/?docsf=1" rel="nofollow">http://office.live.com/?docsf=1</a><p>They are pretty impressive. A bit slow and far from feature complete, but definitely in the same league as Google's suite. If Microsoft keeps their foot on the gas, they may be able to block Google's assault on Office.<p>EDIT: I heard that they would have support for <i>rendering</i> 100% of offline Office's documents/features. Is that still true? Would those parts of the documents simply be read-only online?
(Disclaimer: I worked on the Word Viewer Web App last summer)<p>One of the things I think differentiates this from Google Docs, albeit for a small subset of users, is that equations created in the rich client's equation editor are rendered in the viewer (it just so happened the only Word doc I have on Sky drive is a problem set). Most people won't care, but it's pretty nice if you do use it. My pet use case: If you keep your stuff on Skydrive (I don't...yet) and need to print from a non-Windows machine, it's nice not to have to have emailed oneself a PDF generated by the rich client.<p>Being able to edit the equations would be great, but perhaps unsurprisingly, that's beyond the scope of the 1.0 release.
This was my take at the time it was first announced: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=703627" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=703627</a><p>It's a shame they went with Sharepoint as host for the business version, but meh.<p>I have to say the interface is pretty nice; it would have creamed the last version of Google Docs, but I think the recent docs updates levels the field a lot (to be honest, they really feel like two different offerings anyway - I like the current version of Word for "fancy" documents and docs.google for hardcore writing).<p>Having Powerpoint in the cloud is brilliant, on the other hand the lack of word count in Word is annoying.<p>All in all mixed results; I am guessing things will expand rapidly.
In Chrome, it's somewhat less impressive than Google Docs. Here is the entire user experience for me:<p><i>Browser not supported
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Well, interesting. Less features than Google Docs has, but I'm afraid people will like it simply because it looks more like their Office 2007/2010 :(<p>They'll have much less work than Google Docs in convincing users to use it. meh.