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I give props to MS for its progression, but MS's web-based editors just can't compare to Google's. Some of them require Silverlight plugin. Also, its word-processing editor cannot do concurrent editing in its web app.

Also, this is surreal, but if the documentation is to be believed, this new Google plugin supports more versions of MS Office than MS's own cloud apps do.

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> Some of them require Silverlight plugin.

Silverlight will improve the experience, but is not a requirement.

> this new Google plugin supports more versions of MS Office than MS's own cloud apps do.

It's a mixed bag. Office 2003/2007 can't save to Skydrive, but this Google plug-in can't do document co-authoring (the merge story with this plug-in isn't pretty).

It's opinion, of course; I use MS's web-based editors quite a lot, and they work well for me. I almost always have access to the local client software, too, so most of the time it doesn't even really matter; skydrive is just a great cloud-storage thingy for my documents. For the times I don't have a copy of office on the machine, the web editors are fine.

I haven't yet run into the concurrent editing problem, but it may well be a showstopper for some features. For note-taking (which is the common case I can think of), OneNote is arguably a better choice, and it supports concurrent editing.

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