Fortune: Microsoft about to offer online version of Office for free

oh yeah. the trouble is online apps. 'cause Iwork has autosave doesn't it? a *** office suite with over 4 years and 4 versions and they don't have an autosave feature? what the hell is that?
i've lost (on tuesday) a thesis proposal i was doing for my PhD, and i was already late. a great writing, a great text flow, clear, simple and all that i wanted to explain. then, after finishing the damn work i was doing the formatiing, accidentaly pressed "iwork.com" button and voila! pages crashes leaving me with the few pages saved a couple of days before, losing over 10 pages of solid dense text.
oh yeah.. and then i found out that there is no way whatsoever to retrieve this work 'cause this pearl of programmin doesn't have an autosave feature! something so basic as breaks in a car. WTF were they thinking?...
and apparently WTF was i thinking. guess Google, with his Big Brother style of recording everything to the cloud is a far better proposal than half baked "lots of cutes but not much substance" apple iworks.

I have a sprint mogul and one of the things I've been wondering about is being able to sync my google docs documents with my cell phone (I only do it with word and excel files on my computer). But if Microsoft has office online, then I could just use that and (I assume) sync w/ my Windows Mobile PDA easier. I would prefer to use Google documents though since I have my gmail up all day.

My Mogul is a piece of crap and I'll be moving to a Palm Pre or the new Blackberry Tour soon so perhaps it will be easier with that.

FAIL!

@#3 Johnny - you can download your files from Google Docs locally (with options as a doc file, text, pdf, rtf, html, open office, etc).

It saves automatically online to the cloud periodically with options to click save manually too.

Working within a company with employees/staff, Google Docs has been so extremely crucial for us to share basic documents, etc.

I've not touched Office '07/'08 since leaving uni (and not needing dynamic referencing feature which was all I used it for).

Now I'm a teacher, and I find iWork is brilliant for desktop-publishing documents and formatting exams/booklets quickly and in such an aesthetically pleasing way.

Just finished a 60 page booklet for a biology subject, and there's no way I could have laid it out so easily in Word '08 as I have done in Pages '09.

Google Docs is handy though, for quick collaboration (e.g. brilliant for wedding planning, etc.), or if you don't have access to a client-side app, and it's certainly a VERY viable option for education institutions.

I just wish my school would flick over to the FREE Google Apps, instead of throwing money at MS every year...sigh.

Personally, I think the free desktop and web based office suites are more than adequate and in some areas have innovated past Microsoft Office. Lotus Symphony has it's own web browser for crying out loud. Unfortunately, legions of office drones have put so much of their lives into Word and Excel that they will never switch unless forced to. Long after Microsoft Word took over, I kept hearing seeing Wordperfect overlays on keyboards. Resistance to change is especially unfortunate now, considering most companies would really benefit from dropping their software budget to zero.

My biggest problem with online apps like this is that they are not feature rich. Google's word processing app is a glorified text editor.

I wrote my dissertation in Word, but I have written hundreds of pages in Open Office over the past few years, and it has plug-ins that allow me to import/export to google docs and zoho, so it has been the best of both worlds for me. Office 2008 is all right, but it does too many of the things that I'd never do (processor/space overhead), and adds too much extra code to the text for me to be able to do the things I want to do. I wouldn't pop anything too mission critical on just a web-based service, either - that's nuts. On the other hand, it really makes it easy to collaborate with others and do the occasional "touch-up" if you have an online version available for that purpose.

One other "office" option to consider is Lotus' Symphony product. Related to OpenOffice in some ways and a nice (free, multi-OS) option as well. symphony.lotus.com

As impressive as Office 2010 is, I'm waiting to see how good the next version of Office for Mac is going to be. Hopefully it won't totally fail like Office 2008 was running on Leopard (hint: total failure when using Spaces!)