With Office Live — a suite of small business online offerings, such as a calendar, messenging, hosting and so on — is currently in invitation-only beta, Bill Gates is publicly throwing everyone a bone.

Microsoft may, in fact, release a true “Office” lite product online, which may have a full suite of web-based productivity applications.  Mr. Gates has gone on record saying (courtesy of the Financial Times): “We’re going to cover 100 per cent of the productivity needs – our track record is to keep innovating.”

With no timetable on the horizon, will we ever see a web-based “Word”, “Excel” or “Outlook” in the near future?  And how much Microsoft resources have been devoted to this project?  Can we expect another out-of-the-blue announcement by Microsoft a la Xbox360-streams-HD-programming-from-non-Disney-sources?

Hard to say.  But Bill does leave us with this tasty morsel:

While maintaining that most office workers would continue to use full versions of the Office desktop software, Mr Gates suggested that they would in future find it easier to access their work from any machine – one of the advantages of the online services.

“There’s a difference between actually running an application on a server versus letting a document be found on a server,” he said. “We’re going to make a push to let you keep documents on a server.”