If ever there was a company that based its entire business model around consumers buying more and more complex software in tandem with more and more powerful hardware, it’s was Microsoft. If ever any company was stalwartly opposed to the give-it-away free, put-it-in-the-cloud strategy of nouveau-tech startups, it was Microsoft.
Enter Microsoft Office Web Apps. They debuted with Office 2010 beta yesterday. They’re free. They’re cloud-based. And they’re from Microsoft. Seriously.
The Office Web Apps are lightweight versions of the real MS Office 2010 apps. The catch is that even the desktop MS Office 2010 apps can save to Microsoft’s SkyDrive online storage service. The Office Web apps are for people who don’t have MS Office on their local machine. You can bet they’re pretty feature-light, and the Web apps will serve as upsells to Office 2010 proper, just like Office 2010 Starter — a free OEM desktop version of Office that is ad-supported, but the ads are exclusively upsells for MS Office 2010.
And if that isn’t enough, Office 2010 all has a “Click To Run” version, where users “buy” Office 2010 from Office.com, download a thin client, and then run virtualized versions of MS Office on their local machine. Think of it as a piracy-proof version of Office 2010, with users trusting the bulk of the tech to the cloud.
Just remember, the mass T-Mobile Sidekick data loss — where all the cloud-based data stored for Sidekick handheld users — was overseen by Microsoft. That was just phone numbers, but almost six week s later there’s still no sign of any of those users getting their data back.
Are you ready to give Microsoft your entire copy of Office — which you’ve paid for — including all your documents? Steve Ballmer thinks a lot of people will. We’ll see.
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