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Next Version of Microsoft Office Coming to the Cloud

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No real surprise here given the way things are moving, but Microsoft announced today at PDC2008 that the next version of Microsoft Office will indeed include browser based versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and yes, OneNote. They won’t be fulled featured, (Microsoft is calling them “lightweight”) and they should be comparable to Google’s web apps. It looks like they will also work not only in IE, but Firefox and Safari as well.

The Office Web applications will be available through Office Live, which is a service that will have both ad-supported and subscription models, so don’t look for these to be quite the “freebie” that other web office solutions now offer.

Via ReadWriteWeb

5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. sfwrtr

    10/28/2008 at 1:19 pm

    A lightweight Office suite? Dealing with feature bloat in every release of Office at the expense of usability has been a pain. I have used Word since it first appeared on the Mac many many years ago. I stopped buying every upgrade when the 98 upgrade added ridiculous HTML features and broke master documents. I’m using 2003 now for compatibility with work, but no other reason. Stripping features will be a breath of fresh air, especially if MS provides the non-browser version a way of being lightweight also.

    BTW, an exception for me is OneNote, though the transition from 2003 to 2007 broke a few features I liked. Hopefully, OneNote will finally allow you to set keyboard shortcuts…

  2. scoobie

    10/28/2008 at 2:12 pm

    Onenote on the Web sounds great – and I can see from photos that it features tags in the online version

  3. scoobie

    10/28/2008 at 2:27 pm

    There is a demo of Onenote on the web here, the screen resolution is a bit low I find (is there a hi res version) but they also briefly show Onenote 14!
    https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/PDCNews/First-Look-Office-14-for-Web/

  4. GoodThings2Life

    10/28/2008 at 4:53 pm

    I said the same thing about Google Docs– I still don’t see what the point of this is?

    If I still have to have a PC with an OS and a web browser installed, why not just install a copy of Office (Microsoft or Open) and have direct control over all my data? Why would I trust Google or Microsoft to keep my data accessible off in la-la land when I know full well that anything can be hacked, shut down, leaked, indexed, etc etc ?

  5. GoodThings2Life

    10/28/2008 at 8:46 pm

    OK, after watching the full blown video I’ll offer this– I can see the multi-editor capabilities getting tied into SharePoint portals so that a business and client can collaborate on a document. That is incredibly useful.

    But to depend on a web connection to edit my documents… that still seems absurd to me, especially in a corporate environment where you’ll already have the client version installed.

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