Late last week, Microsoft unveiled the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of MS Web Office, the web-hosted counterpart to its ubiquitous Office suite of desktop productivity applications (see some screenshots here). Although the online suite is intended to complement rather than replace the desktop version, many observers see this new Office-in-the-clouds offering as an answer to competition from Google's competing Web-based suite, Google Apps. But as Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley outlined last week, Microsoft's timetable for general availability of a full production version stretches out well into next year (the CTP is available to several thousand specially selected testers):
"Testers will get access to Word Web App, Excel Web App and PowerPoint Web App. One Note Web App access will be added this fall ... Microsoft's game plan remains to deliver a public beta of Office Web Apps later this fall and the final version in the first half of calendar 2010 (I've heard May/June)."
Halfway through next year is a long time to wait for the production versions, although of course many may regard the beta version as good enough to use (the tradition in Web applications, after all, is to leave the 'beta' tag in place until long after the application has become stable). But Microsoft's plans to let customers and partners install on-premise and third-party hosted versions of the online suite may hamper its flexibility to perform like a true cloud application. There's word, too, that print capabilities will be restricted, even in the production version.
All of this is happening against a backdrop of fast-growing Google Apps usage. A survey by market researcher IDC last week reported that Google's online office suite is already widely used in one in five workplaces. This is up from one in twenty the last time IDC asked the same question in a December 2007 survey. "The fact that Google Docs is being picked up so quickly shows tremendous momentum, and that's a huge threat to Microsoft," said IDC's Melissa Webster, although the survey also found that Microsoft Office was in use at an overwhelming 97 percent of workplaces.
Of course, Microsoft is in no rush to cannibalize its lucrative license revenues from the existing Office product, especially with a new version coming out that it will want to market heavily. But I can't help wondering whether the online Web Office suite is going to have too few useful functions and arrive in the market too late to stem the loss of customers to Google and others such as Zoho.
Good luck with replacing ms office. There are so many things office does that google does not, like play nice with other service providers and apps...and I don't think using gmail for personal use while at work really qualifies as usage...lol