Well, I kind of said as much a few days ago(yes, that was a fairly blatant pat on my own back), but the New York Times does a nice little piece on the debut of Office Live by Microsoft, which explains exactly how its going to differ from Google’s offering:

Microsoft will be paying for stuff most businesses have been paying up to $100 a year now already – domain registration and web hosting (plus some templates that are ‘design’, and some sort of analytics package).

David Pogue puts it this way:

But if you have a small business — if you run a dance studio, sell hand-made bracelets on eBay, deal in old comic books, whatever — at least have the conversation. In Office Live, Microsoft has vaporized a number of obstacles that once stood between tiny start-ups and the big time: the cost and hassle of establishing a proper Web site, the complexity and expense of playing the search-engine ad game, and the headache of maintaining proper books.

Small business all-in-one hosting packages are not new, and are even offered by Domain registration companies now (cough Go Daddy! cough!). The new thing that’s worth repeating (although, I promise for the last time) is how “free” changes the equation for Microsoft.

With the marketing might behind Microsoft, I expect to be hearing about Office Live in the mainstream media for weeks to come; if its stable and as easy to use (but not without its imperfections) as Mr. Pogue makes it out to be, Microsoft might just done more than just grab a metal chair in the fight against Google.

They may have, in fact, Hulked up for real.

[And for those of you whose pop culture knowledge is a bit wanting ,I point you to the Urban Dictionary, for the term “Hulking Up”]