First-order effects

• Office users get a final, supported version of Office Live Workspace for online storage and document sharing, ending the beta label on Microsoft's collaboration adjunct to Office.
• Microsoft gains a shippable answer to Google Docs in the browser, letting it market an online companion to the installed Office base rather than ceding that ground entirely.

Second-order effects

• Google faces pressure to accelerate its own office suite's maturation, since Microsoft's distribution advantage through the massive installed Office base narrows the feature gap Google was exploiting.
• The storage-and-sharing model here — documents still edited in desktop Office but hosted online — invites bridging tools from both sides, as later seen when Google Cloud Connect brought cloud sync into Microsoft Office and its rough early hands-on showed how hard that bridge was to build.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, the office productivity market shifts from a desktop-license business to one where the browser is the default sharing layer and co-authoring is table stakes — a trajectory that culminates years later in real-time co-authoring across third-party clouds like Dropbox and Box.
• The eventual question becomes whether Microsoft's hybrid (desktop-first, web-adjacent) approach or Google's web-native approach defines the work surface — a tension that persists as the office document evolves into a platform for agents and automation.