On Lives’ train wreck: Office on the I Pad

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) February 10, 2012 --

The On Live Desktop service shows just how wrong desktop virtualization can be Demos, like appearances, can be deceiving. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, one of the media hits was On Live Desktop, a service that provisions a Windows 7 desktop environment that includes Microsoft Office 2010 to the I Pad over an Internet connection. For many, the idea of being able to run the full Office suite is very appealing, given some of the limitations of the I Pad's native office productivity tools such as Apple I Work suite (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers), Quick office, and Documents to Go.
But the reality of On Live Desktop is awful. Yes, you get the full Windows 7 desktop and the full Word, PowerPoint, and Excel applications. But a surprising lack of integration means the Windows and I Pad environments remain almost completely separate, with usability falling through the cracks.

The remote desktop never felt so remote. You can't copy and paste text or images between Windows and is, or even upload files to your On Live Desktop from the I Pad. You lose your session if you switch to another I Pad application. In-progress work is saved to temp files in your On Live cloud-based account folder, where all your files are stored, so at least you don't lose those efforts. But leaving On Live Desktop to, say, check your email requires logging into On Live Desktop again and reopening the file when you return.

You can't use the I Pad's native onscreen keyboard with On Live Desktop either, just the too-small-to-type-on Windows 7 onscreen keyboard, whose poor design makes it float above whatever you are working on, requiring constant pushing around the desktop. And you can't use basic gestures like zoom, which is a big problem because On Lives’ Windows desktop is too big for the I Pad's screen resolution, causing it to be shrunk to fit and making everything tiny and unreadable. (I had to use reading glasses.) There are no UI controls for On Live Desktop in the app nor in the On Live Desktop section of the I Pad's Settings app. Worse, the On Live Desktop's Windows environment has no Control Panel, so you can't use Windows' own UI customization capabilities to change the display settings.
The only I Pad capabilities you can use are fingers to access Windows 7's limited gesture capabilities, a finger or stylus to conduct mouse movements within Windows apps, and an external Bluetooth keyboard to type with. You can use an I Pad's Bluetooth keyboard but not the I Pad onscreen keyboard.

With On Live Desktop, you get a pure Windows 7 and Office 2010 environment that can't interact with the device you're using it on or the content available to that device; that is scaled inappropriately for the I Pad's screen resolution; and that is available only when you have a broadband Internet connection. The service isn't consistently accessible; the error message blames the Internet connection speed, but I don't believe it. Each time this happened, I could get access a few seconds later on the same Wi-Fi network and back-end broadband connection. That feels like a capacity issue at On Lives’ servers or cloud provider.
OnLive Desktop is available for free, which is no bargain given its overall uselessness. On Live plans to offer paid subscriptions starting at $10 per user per month that increase the included storage capacity from the free version's 2GB and provides "priority access" to the On Live servers. That lets you install your own Windows apps, as well as one that is IT-manageable (meaning IT can specify user entitlements to Windows apps). These service versions are not yet available, so I could not test if they addressed any of the free version's shortcomings.

Still, I can't imagine anyone using On Live Desktop for real work. I suppose if you have Office projects that use capabilities not available in native I Pad apps -- such as the need to edit style sheets or do revisions tracking in Word documents – On Live Desktop could be useful when you have no other option and can't wait until you get to a real PC.
Unfortunately, despite the concept's clear appeal, On Live Desktop's Windows-via-the-cloud offering is too awful in its current state, and it's a great example of why you can't stick one operating system onto another without any integration.



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