Ok the last 2 posts have been very negative towards Office Live and Microsoft in general, and I know it's easy to be an outside critic and tempting to just pick out the negatives without putting forward positives, so here goes my wish list for what Office Live (OL) could be:

1) OL should include a text editor or basic word processor that can open native Word files and saves to modern word files (preferably the more open xml variants). It only needs the ~20% of feature in the user interface that I actually use, ie basic editing rather than exotic page layout and pagination. Can't be done through a web browser ? check out Writely . It can be done and it can be even better than Writely with Microsoft's resources to hand.

2) OL should include basic spreadsheet functionality (Or numerical processing). Again this should support exiting Excel Formats for input and save to latest version of Excel formats. Again it only needs to support ~20% of the features currently within Excel (Thats all I use). Can't be done through a web browser ? check out NumSum. It can be done and it can be even better than NumSum with Microsoft's resources to hand.

3) OL should include presentation facilities, preferably that read and write PowerPoint formats. Again we only need basic ~20% of features currently offered. Can't be done through a web browser ? check out S5. It can be done and it can be even better than S5 with Microsoft's resources to hand. Oh and it would be great if it supports OPML also.

4) OL should support online database, preferably supporting access file formats (maybe just import/export). Again we don't need all the bells and whistles, just basic database creation/management. Can't be done through a web browser ? check out
GoogleBase . I'm am also convinced Microsoft could better GoogleBase just by supporting MS Access, That allows businesses to migrate easily, there must be millions of access databases out there that could be migrated online in this fashion.

5) Add a good Blogging tool into to the mix for company communications, I won't link to examples here as there is already many to choose from. but of course support standards like RSS and OPML as well as XMLRPC to give user choice.

A few other things would be useful but not essential :
Open Office file support (ODF)
RSS readers that can priorities different categories of RSS
RSS subscription to any item/document for changes
Some sort of WIKI functionality with a rich text interface.
Open standard VOIP support with logging,voicemail,rss notifications
IMAP and or Push support for the email (Better for loosely connected devices)
Spam/Virus Filtering
An outliner
Ability to reskin/re-purpous/mashup all the tools and services using open standard and REST based APIs

All of this must be multi platform and multi browser supported based on open standards of course. (We use Macs and Linux as well as Windows XP, not unusual now-a-days, different tools for different jobs)

I could probably think of more but that would be more than enough for me to switch our micro business to Office Live.

What do you believe my chances of getting any of this are?

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