Hotmail co-founder, Mr. Sabeer Bhatia has joined the rush to shift office applications from the desktop to the web.

This time, Mr. Bhatia has brought out an application known as ‘Live Documents’ that is a set of online applications resembling GoogleDocs.

But the freshly launched application is much better than the Google pack, Mr. Bhatia said.

Like Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace, Sabeer Bhatia's Live Documents provides a web-based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications that can be accessed from any platform.

It is named as a hybrid online-offline suite because it provides a web-based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications, which can be accessed from any Flash supporting web browser. It also consists of a desktop client that plugs into MS Office to offer collaboration and synchronization features.

Mr. Bhatia said that the product, which is in development for the last two years, is truly a ‘Made in India’ product.

Mr. Bhatia said, “I believe Live Documents does what Hotmail (which Bhatia sold to Microsoft for a little over $400 million) did for e-mail.”

Sumanth Raghavendra, CEO, Instacoll, said, “The launch of Live Documents will fill all the gaps that Microsoft has not been able to fill, especially in the online category. With its software and services approach, users can access this via a hosted model, on premises servers or use a plug and play appliance.”

The company already has ‘Aricent’ as its first enterprise client. Nearly 7,000 employees of Aricent will be using this application.

“The pricing will be minimal even for the enterprises. As low as $50 for the full year or $10 per month. Volumes can always bring down the price further,” Mr. Bhatia said.

He also commented that Live Documents will permit companies to slash costs.

By making use of any Rich Internet Application technologies including as Flash and Flex, Live Documents lets a user to view and edit documents through any common browser, on any operating system, from anywhere. It also permits teamwork on real-time basis.