Software giant to put free office applications online for Windows Live users
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Microsoft has announced plans to put free applications from its forthcoming Office 2010 software on the web.
In a move that pits it against Google’s free office document suite (Google Docs) the software giant said users of its Windows Live services and software such as calendars and instant messaging, will be able to use light-weight versions of many Office applications.
So what we are going to be seeing is yet another battle as to who can do it better and while MS has been doing office applications as software for ages Google has been in the clud with it longer.
Recently Google and Microsoft have been competing in each other’s dominant area. Last month, Microsoft released a new search engine, Bing, to challenge Google.
And Google hit back by announcing a move into the operating system arena with Chrome OS. This extension of its Chrome web browser is expected to be released next year.
I do not think, though, that Google will have to fear much from Bing, or whatever else a silly name MS might like to give its search engine. Unless it is going to be better than MSN Search which became Live Search and now Bing, it is not going to be any competition to Google whatsoever.
Web based office 2010 applications will include Excel, One Note, Power Point and Word. But the company warned they will have reduced functionality compared to the full installation of Office.
The full version of Office 2010 will include new features such as an image-processing tool and an enhanced cut-and-paste function for Word.
To give more ‘oomph’ to Power Point presentations the company has also included a video-processing tool. Microsoft also plans to include tools to deal with email management in Outlook.
Office 2010 will be released in the first half of next year and can be installed on PCs running Windows XP with service pack 3, Vista, and the yet-to-be-released Windows 7 operating system.
But Office 2010 is, once again, going to be, for PC installation, a rather costly piece of software and I cannot understand why the majority of users would want to bother forking out vast sums for something they can get for free in the form of Open Office, the Open Source software equivalent to Office.
I have been using Open Office now for years and have not looked back. No loopholes no exploits; just software that works. Thanks!
As for online documents; I guess I stick with Google Docs, thanks!
© 2009
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Monday, 17 August 2009
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