After years of questioning the value of net-based productivity applications, Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it will offer new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint that can run from within a standard web browser.
Microsoft will use its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles to show off browser-based versions of its Office programs.
In an interview, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, said that the browser-based editing capabilities are being developed in conjunction with the next version of Office, known as Office 14.
Microsoft will not say when Office 14 will arrive, but Elop said that a technology preview of the browser-based products will come later this year and that a beta version will be released in 2009.
Microsoft will offer browser-based Word, Excel and PowerPoint in two ways. For consumers, they will be offered via Microsoft's Office Live website, while businesses will be able to access browser-based Office capabilities through Microsoft's SharePoint Server product.
The company has been pushed into this arena by Google, which has been offering its free Google Apps programs for some time. In competing with Google, Microsoft is touting the ability to use a familiar user interface, as well as the fact that all of a document's characteristics are preserved.
"If you go into some competitive products right now and take a Word document in and then spit it out afterwards, it's unrecognisable," Elop said. "You lose a lot of fidelity."
Elop said that not all of the editing capabilities of the desktop products are in the browser versions. "[We are characterising] the editing… as lightweight editing," he said.
Although Google Apps is mainly popular among consumers, it has started to attract attention from corporate customers.
Google Apps has received interest from Procter & Gamble, which only decided to stick with Office after persuasion on the part of Microsoft. Part of the pitch, Elop said, included Microsoft offering details on its plans for the web-based versions of the Office programs.
"This was part of the conversation, absolutely," Elop said. "We have been sharing with customers, under varying circumstances, to a greater or lesser extent."
Although Elop didn't specify names, he said Microsoft has found itself in a competitive situation with Google in other business accounts as well.
Talkback
Has everyone in the world gone stark, staring mad?
There is absolutely no way in the world I'll place important documents of mine in an unknown location of an unknown country, where I do not have any sort of guarantee of, a: access, b: security, c: data integrity.
That any company would even begin to think of such an option is truly frightening.
Good points, but in practice documents are far less likely to be lost, damaged, or overwritten by old versions when they are stored in the cloud.
Google Docs is amazing, and, if paid for, support is provided. I really don't care that Word documents lose fidelity when run through the system as I don't use client -side word processors any more.
I was starting to wonder if I was missing the point somewhere. 95% of the planet seems to have bought gallons of this "Computing in the Cloud" koolaid and quaffed the lot. The other 5% (in which I include myself) don't want to be beholden to some faceless, locationless corporate who places their bottom line 1st, 2nd, 3rd and last. I would personally far rather go with self hosting and own the hardware, the (open source ?) software and the data. A decent encrypted, online, offsite backup system and Robert is your father's brother.
The latest round of "It's for the children" insanity from Jaqubooti Smith, with her database of all our online utterances only adds piquancy to this mix. She can't have my mail logs without a court order signed by a judge.
For more of this ranting see the (self hosted ;-) web page at http://www.anvil.org/articles/self_hosting/
I could see a "Cloud"-based office suite sitting on a server inside a business' intranet, behind its own firewall. But trusting my business documents or contracts, mortgages, etc etc to a service run by a company that changes product names faster than banks change their names!
No way. Most stupid idea yet.
I can see doing software delivery, entertainment content, news, text messaging via Internet connections but allowing the PRIMARY storage media to be out of physical reach is ridiculous.
Off-site storage of ENCRYPTED backups is as far as it goes.
You can bet that the cloud hosts will have a denial of responsibility in the small print of their contracts or UELAs. But hey...people will go there and entrust everything. You know how news media is always looking for a good story, I'm sure there will be plenty!
Yes the fine-print you know that absolves the host company for any responsibility except billing you the customer.
It would be refreshing, it might even be revolutionary for a IT-related services company to accept responsibility to deliver to the customer exactly the service he/she is paying for. And for those instances where the company screwed up, they would own up and say: "Yes we screwed up". It seems that the computer services industry is filled with people that do not take or accept responsibility for anything.
The EULA document written by Microsoft should be ruled as null & void world-wide and all derivatives of it as well. Since Microsoft has managed to get it through the courts, everybody uses it. Force a service or software company to accept responsibility for failures that are directly related to their product's failure to perform as intended. Consumer rights have never been enforced in software failures.