Office Live and the SkyDrive are not anything new, both as a product as well as a concept.
Personally, I love the idea of Cloud Computing. It’s not only a secure method (read “secure” as not impervious rather, “My-hard-drive-just-crashed-and-I-lost-my-thesis” secure), but with nearly all people connect to the Internet at home, work, schools and everywhere else (just about); why not let large corporate servers take care of your simple documents and spreadsheets?
I keep my simple documents in Google Docs, PDFs in DropBox and miscellaneous stuff in Box.net. Now the reason for that is pretty much due to space limitations. Google Docs just gives me a gig, and DropBox and Box about two gig. Not bad for free, but fills up fast. My PDFs for example, manuals and tech books I like to read, are rather large and voluminous.
Sky Drive has 25GB of space available for free. That’s really a fabulous amount of space, especially if you can store any file type on the “cloud”. I still don’t recommend saving very important or “top secret” file on a cloud, but all others, why not.
So comparing Google Docs to Office Live is straight forward. Google Docs has a clean simple rich text editor style to it. It also does a good job of formatting the finished document for Microsoft Office products. But now is there really a need for Google Docs if I can just use straight up Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote? I don’t see a reason to switch, and there is never a time when a secondary option isn’t welcome. So, no I won’t switch, but I will use it from time to time. All the main Office apps that are necessary for everyone from a major company to a single-man operation like myself to do business with these file formats.
While I won’t be eliminating my other “cloud” accounts, I’m very happy to say that SkyDrive and Office Live, will more than likely come in very handy.
Take a look at some screencaps below to see how it looks for yourself.