Microsoft moves towards Document 2.0
Microsoft announced yesterday that their next Generation of Office applications will see many of its core components translated into web-based, cloud-hosted applications. Following the path of Google Docs, Zoho docs, or even OpenOffice 3.0 (made available on the cloud by Ulteo), this web-based version of Microsoft Office will have many of the Document 2.0 affordances such as instant collaboration or online storage, but will only be available late 2009 or early 2010 (as part of its Office 14 launch).
Why wait so long? The Office 2007 applications can already be tested in a browser in Office 2007 test drive today, so it cannot be that big of a deal? My suspicion is that this time will allow Microsoft to find the right business model. But Zoho, Google and OpenOffice will have moved on…
