MS Office in the clouds

Following Microsoft's announcement of Azure, they've finally responded to Google and others' threat to eat their highly profitable Office franchise with a web-based suite of office appications. It promises to bring MS's deep skills with these apps to the web browser with close integration with their desktop counterparts - the best of both worlds. 

But we won't see this offering for a year - this is the old Microsoft game of lagging the innovators and hobbling them by telling the market to wait for the 'real' thing.

Except in this case the main innovator is Google Docs ('Google Apps' in its business guise) which is rapidly maturing into a great product. Yes, the features of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation apps are basic and a bit buggy, but they're all that most people use anyway.

Beyond that, the collaboration side of GDocs is superb - you can see other people editing a spreadsheet as you work on adjacent cells - multi-player network gaming reaches the accounts dept! Add in that anything from Google is fast and works across platforms and you have a compelling leader. Then remember that Google knows how to run large-scale online services and that Microsoft is a beginner (Hotmail doesn't really count - they bought it in and have never made much progress with it) and Microsoft are looking low and slow...

Conosco's IT Support service looks forwards to these developments reaching our customers - we can advise you when they are mature enough for you to adopt.