“We have over a half a billion customers world-wide and what we hear from them is that they really want the power of the web without compromise. They want collaboration without compromise.
“And what they tell us today is that going to the web often means they sacrifice fidelity, functionality and the quality of the content they care about. We knew that if and when we were ever going to bring applications into a web environment, we needed to do the hard work first because we hold such a high bar”
via BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft Office takes to the web.
Microsoft has just unveiled the next version of its Office suite of productivity programs, Office 2010, and announced that it will include free, online lightweight versions of its four most popular software programs – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
The suite will be released next year and it is a direct shot at Google’s suite of web-based office applications, Google Docs. This battle and the trend of software going online into a cloud will be interesting to follow in the upcoming months.
The one thing is sure, it is the customer that will win as these companies will do everything they can to improve their products so that the customer ends up using them instead of the competitor.