Microsoft Office Web Applications – finally announced
Microsoft is finally introducing an online, cloud-based version of its Microsoft Office products, as annonced during their Office 2010 Worldwide Partner conference.
These Web Apps, including Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and One Note, will be free, but might not be fully featured.
Microsoft is quite late in the Document 2.0 game, compared to Web-based document editing pioneers like Google (for Google Docs) or (lesser known but arguably more powerful) Zoho Docs - to mention only a few mainstream players. Even OpenOffice 3.0 has been available online for quite a few months (on the Ulteo cloud computing infrastructure. Microsoft ensures cross-browser compatibility, and could have a few cards to play through a tight integration with its desktop software and its Azure infrastructure – wait and see.
As competing “clouds” develop there will be need for some “integrative” clouds that can enable seamless integration across the competing clouds.
Maybe an opportunity for players like Xerox,IBM etc. in this sphere.
Users would love to have the ability to move and work on documents across these competing cloud platforms.