It was more than a decade ago that Microsoft’s Outlook email client first became accessible over the Web. Now the rest of the company’s flagship Office suite is following suit. At the opening of its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this morning, Microsoft announced a “technical preview” of Office 2010 and revealed that some of its key applications–Word, Excel and PowerPoint–will be available over the Web in 2010. For free.
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Q: How much revenue flows through this (Apps)? A: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’re going to get.
Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft and its entrenchment in this particular sector? A: Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem.
That’s a start, I suppose.
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In a year, Google Apps will be “night and day from what they are today.” That’s what Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division, told attendees of the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch Technology Conference last week. Today we’ll likely find out whether that was truly a foretelling of things to come or more Google braggadocio. At an event in San Francisco, Google was set to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft Office. Click through for a live blog of the event.
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Business journalists who had their careers curtailed by the souring economy might consider stopping by the Securities and Exchange Commission on their next trip to the unemployment office. The agency may have a good use for their talents, according to Chairman Mary Schapiro, who finds the sadly diminished ranks of the business press worrisome.
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Is Microsoft truly committed to bringing its major productivity applications to mobile devices? Of course it is. Will the iPhone be one of them? Absolutely. How can I say that with such certainty? Well, because Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business Division, hinted at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday that it would be. But more importantly, because Microsoft formally announced it last November.
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Its hopes of rebuilding under bankruptcy protection effectively dashed by the ongoing financial crisis, Nortel is considering selling off its two biggest business units to rivals. Reportedly on the block: the company’s wireless-gear and office telecom equipment units.
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If Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman are planning a membership drive for their new Anti-Cloud Computing Coalition, they best not go knocking on Steve Ballmer’s door. Because the Microsoft CEO might not agree with their assessment of the Cloud Computing sobriquet as “complete gibberish,” “idiocy,” “stupidity,” and “worse than stupidity.” At an event in London today, Ballmer said Microsoft will debut its own “cloud operating system” at its Professional Developer Conference at the end of this month.
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A recent sampling of U.S. PC users by research outfit NPD found that 73 percent had never even heard of Google Docs, the search sovereign’s collaborative word-processing tool, or any other online productivity applications, for that matter. That may soon change, thanks to an embellishment that adds offline access to what had been an exclusively [...]
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In a May 1995 memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates declared that the Internet was the “most important single development” since the IBM PC, one that was fast becoming a global communications and computing medium. “I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance,” he [...]
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Soldiering on in its quest not to compete with Microsoft’s core office-productivity software business, Google last night added another component to its Web-based productivity suite– Google Sites. Created from JotSpot, the hosted wiki platform Google acquired back in 2006, Sites is essentially a lightweight version of Microsoft’s business collaboration program SharePoint.
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The changing of the guard at Microsoft as Bill Gates prepares to step down is becoming more of a mass exodus.
First, Bruce Jaffe, the corporate vice president responsible for Microsoft’s acquisitions, announces plans to leave the company at the end of February. Then Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft’s general manager of Platform Strategy, resigns to join a [...]
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The long-term shift toward Web-based software is apparently taking a bit longer than expected. According to a new survey from research outfit NPD, 73% of PC users have never tried a Web-based office productivity suite. And of those who have, only a paltry 0.5% have been impressed enough to abandon their desktop office applications.
“The [...]
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