Microsoft Office Live Workspace

» see workspace.officelive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

office live workspace was microsoft's first answer to the question of what office should look like in a browser. it was announced in september 2007 as a free service tied to a windows live id. the closed beta opened in october 2007 to a few thousand users in the united states. public beta arrived march 2008 and microsoft started promoting it as a free companion to office 2003 and office 2007.

the pitch was that you could store up to a thousand documents per workspace in the cloud and share them with anyone via a link, with browser viewing built in. the catch was that "view" was the whole story. you could not actually edit a docx in office live workspace itself. to edit, you had to open the file in installed desktop office, which kicked off a sync round-trip through a plugin called the office live update. by 2008 google docs let you edit directly in the browser with two other people watching the cursor move. the comparison was unforgiving.

microsoft folded the office live team into the windows live division in january 2009. on may 12 2010 they announced that all office live workspace accounts would be migrated to skydrive, which had bigger storage and was about to gain office web apps for actual in-browser editing. the migration ran through summer 2010. by the autumn the workspace.officelive.com domain pointed at skydrive landing pages and the product was effectively gone, with the brand quietly retired before the end of the year.

by 2008 my docs were already in gmail attachments or in google docs. ttnet broadband was good enough at home in ankara by then to make google's "edit live in the browser" pitch actually work. office live workspace looked like microsoft showing up two years late with the wrong version of the product, which is more or less what it was.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch press cycle was kind. tech blogs covered it as the obvious move microsoft had to make. the beta opened with no waiting list and free 5 gb storage per account, which in 2007 felt generous next to gmail's 7 gb. the integration with desktop office worked. if you had office 2007 installed and signed in with your live id, the file menu got a "save to office live workspace" option that uploaded into the right folder without any extra steps. for shared editing inside one company, the model worked.

what the model could not survive was the browser layer. opening a workspace document in a browser without office installed showed you a static html preview that lost formatting from the second page onward. on a coworker's laptop without office, the file looked broken. that was the moment people learned to send a link to google docs instead.

~ the unraveling ~

in the months after the public beta launch microsoft started briefing journalists about a separate product called office web apps, which would let you actually edit documents in a browser. that product was on the office 2010 roadmap and shipped with skydrive in june 2010. once office web apps existed, there was no reason for office live workspace to keep being a separate brand. it had been the placeholder while the real browser-office product was being built.

~ how it actually ended ~

the may 12 2010 announcement was framed as an upgrade. microsoft told users "your workspaces are moving to skydrive" with bigger storage and live editing. behind that framing the product was being deleted. user folders were copied to skydrive with sharing permissions preserved where possible, and the workspace url redirected to the new home. there was no formal end-of-life headstone the way wave or buzz got from google. office live workspace just stopped existing one summer afternoon in ohio.

~ what came after ~

skydrive became onedrive in 2014. office web apps became office on the web, then microsoft 365 web. the basic idea that office documents should live in a microsoft cloud folder with link-sharing is now the dominant way the entire enterprise category works. office live workspace was the first attempt at it. nobody remembers the name and nobody at microsoft has any reason to remind them.

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