Docs.com (Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps + Facebook integration) | Hacker News Reader

Docs.com (Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps + Facebook integration)

docs.com

33 pointsmoserware25 comments

I am looking forward to sharing excel documents with my friends, they are going to have so much fun reviewing my formulas and charts mapping out the quality of our friendship.

Hmm, Microsoft using Facebook connect and not their Passport system, interesting.

Seriously, it's time for MS to just buy Facebook. I really don't get why they didn't snag it a year or two ago. They tried to spend 3x as much as it would have taken (probably 2x now) to buy Facebook in order to buy Yahoo. Even if Facebook never monetizes as well directly as Yahoo (which it quite probably will) it'd be worth more in the grand scheme of things.

Facebook connect is everything that Passport tried (and largely failed) to be. Yahoo+Bing is still only bordering on relevant in search, FB owns social networking.

Put it this way, MSFT shares would rise greatly on the news of a Facebook acquisition.

I'm not quite so sure share price would rise if they bought FB. Why? FB is in no way related to any of Microsoft's core competencies. They would be much better off buying companies that make online collaboration tools in order to capture lost revenue from lost Office sales. How would FB help their bottom line? Ad sales are nice, but at the end of the day MS is a company that makes software - specifically Windows and Office. They should be focused on buying companies that complement/replace that revenue stream.

The problem is that Windows and Office have little long-term potential as profitable products. So what do you do when your core competencies become obsolete? You have to get new ones. You could try really hard to learn new ones, but when you have the money you can also just buy them...

People have been saying that for over a decade about Windows and Office, and they've kept chugging along. I have a strong feeling the same will be true of the next decade.

Facebook is a company that makes software. It's also a platform on which much software is developed. Seems quite fitting to me.

Facebook won't sell though. I'm pretty sure MS would love to buy them if they could, but heavily investing was a good compromise.

I hated scribd, now I hate docs.com. I don't like docs inside docs.

The web page is the doc, don't try to force another doc area with another scrollbar to mess the whole UI experience.

What if there was no outside scrollbar? Would you still accept an inside toolbar/menubar and 95% of the screen filled with a scrollable doc pane like Google Docs (except perhaps with a little less toolbar)?

A bit disappointing that they are using Silverlight.

Not being able to use this on iPad seems to limit its utility.

docs.com is owned by Microsoft, so the use of Silverlight is to be expected. (Note: Not that I agree with it, but just wanted to point out the true owners of the site.)

Agreed. Just fired it up in Chrome on my Mac and got the notification that there is a new version of Silverlight available.

Back Button.

Oh how awful that they used silverlight when you have it installed!

Funny that it works fine on linux/chrome+firefox without silverlight. They do display the message "Improve Your Experience: Documents load faster and text looks clearer when Silverlight is installed. [Install Microsoft Silverlight]"

Microsoft just doesn't get the web at all...

What exactly is the usecase for making excel spreadsheets that I can post on my facebook wall? They even copied the "beta" thing from Google.

The facebook tie-in makes zero sense to me. Why isn't this aimed at business users?

It seemed to work pretty well on my Ubuntu system without having Silverlight installed. But there was a little notification that said documents would load faster if it was installed. I'm always up for a good laugh and was wondering how I would run that Silverlight .exe file on Linux. Well lo and behold there is "Moonlight" which is available as a Firefox plugin that I'm guessing is a way to allow Silverlight apps to work in Linux. Well now that I installed it and restarted my browser, I can't open up any of the Word docs now. Oh well, guess it's back to running Word in XP in a VirtualBox window.

Wow, that's pretty cool. I wish I had this when I was doing some fundraising not long ago. I had to use docstoc, which seems the best of the web-based ones at not mangling a powerpoint but is still kinda sucky.

I heard you like walled gardens, so I put a walled garden in your walled garden.

As if Facebook didn't have enough lock-in, privacy, and data integrity concerns, they now want me to add this 'docs' thing to the equation, so that literally all of my important information is in a walled garden I cannot make private backups of.

Yes, I can make individual backups of the documents, pictures and messages, but I can't view them in their original context, so they're worthless outside of the garden.

It's behaving a bit too much like the desktop version: http://ugg.is/docs.com.fail.png

Yeah. I got an endless loader the first time. The second time I tried it loaded, but when I tried to open a doc I was told I don't have the right version of Office (Word 2008 for Mac).

Docs.com got auto-authorized to use my Facebook account the moment I loaded the page. This is not acceptable, I should have been at least given an Ok, Cancel dialogue to confirm linking my personal Facebook account with some random document sharing service.

Their top menu looks very similar to scoutapp.com's

I wonder if this works on a Zune.... ;-)

Uhh .. It's like Google docs, but without that obnoxious "Don't be evil" part.

I wonder what they paid to get that domain?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com