Recently Microsoft announced that it is stripping some of the crucial applications of Windows 7 and the users have to go online to download applications like Windows Mail using a Windows Live id. Further to their plans now, they have announced that Microsoft office will go online and the online version will be much lighter than the offline versions. The entire Microsoft Office suite including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote etc., will go online and they can be run through any of the user web browser.
According to the Janice Kapner Head of Communications, for the information worker group, which is responsible for developing Microsoft Office applications, announced that they have decided to become part of the cloud computing drive that is becoming popular these days. According to Kapner, this was one of their topics of internal speculation whether to go take the Office products online or just continue to enhance the offline version. However, now Microsoft has now decided to take the Microsoft Office suit online.
Cloud computing has been one of the latest buzzwords with Google and Yahoo. Now Microsoft too has joined the race and it stated that now it is the apt time because people have moved further from just talking about cloud computing. They want to see something more concrete in this area. Microsoft seems to be ready to meet the new gen requirements.
Though Google has already given a taste of cloud computing to its users through its Google Docs and Spreadsheets but Microsoft does not consider this as a valid competition as Google Docs and Spreadsheets are too limited in terms of features and things that they can accomplish when compared to Microsoft Office products. Microsoft estimates that there are over 500 million people using Microsoft Office applications worldwide and as such, it is seemingly one of the major revenue generating area giving Microsoft around $18.9 billion in 2008. This is an amazing 31% of Microsoft’s overall income.
This effort of Microsoft is expected to serve two purposes. Primarily it is to fight one of its major competitors and secondly this is also to reduce the rate of piracy of Microsoft Office products. The online versions of Microsoft Office Suite will be sold on the basis of volume licensing. These hosted services have to be paid for in the form of subscription like all the other Microsoft’s online services including SharePoint and Exchange.
Microsoft is hoping to bring the Office products online before the New Year. This online version will be considered as part of the next version of Microsoft Office. Microsoft hopes that this will give them more control over at least in this domain in which they are already leading. They do not want to be replaced by Google in this domain too. Moreover, by keeping Microsoft Office as a subscription service they will be able to generate more revenue on these products as they will bring in regular flow of revenue.