Work(ing Title)

The modern productivity worker isn’t quite as location-monogamous any longer. People are working from their desks, beds, and gazebos. Office Live Workspace is the beginning of Microsoft’s facilitation of this roaming work style. With the service, documents can be posted online directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to be edited from just about any browser. The days of saving a file to your local machine and using a disjointed browser interface to move it online are coming to a close.

Eric Schonfeld’s initial review of Live Workspace for Techcrunch points out a few of the limitations at present. Most file types are only viewable online and cannot be modified. The only editable documents are those created in Microsoft Word, and those cannot be saved to the desktop from the Web Notes online word processor. Also, the ability to sync documents online is currently restricted to those running Windows with Office XP or later.

While the demand for Microsoft to release feature parity with the current crop of online productivity tools, there’s no great motivation to follow suit. As Joe Wilcox pointed out last month at eWeek, current sales are double the previous release, with Office 2007 volume responsible for 17.4 percent of all software that runs on Windows.

With that sort of growth in Microsoft’s traditional software business, there is a reasonable counterpoint to the Web 2.0 communities death knell for software sold in boxes.