Microsoft is about to confront the biggest threat to its dominance in business software with the release of the latest version of its Office applications.
At stake is the billions of dollars of revenue that Office generates every quarter; at issue, however, is the steady encroachment on to its turf by Google.
The Office suite has more than 500 million users worldwide, but Google is gaining a small yet significant number of customers for its web-based business software. Microsoft is hitting back by offering — for the first time — free, web-based versions of its most popular applications in Office 2010, which will be launched for businesses on May 12 and for consumers next month.
“Lightweight” versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote have been designed to provide access to documents from virtually anywhere and to preserve the look and feel of a document regardless of the device used.
The wider use of “cloud computing” in the workplace — where the applications are run on remote servers rather than on individual desktop computers — could generate huge subscription revenues for the likes of Microsoft, Google, IBM and Cisco.
The Office unit is Microsoft’s biggest business, accounting for a third of its $58.4 billion (£38.3 billion) in sales in the last financial year. Yet the software company has been forced to respond to the challenge of Google, which launched its suite of web-based business applications with Gmail in 2007 and has been steadily adding to them. Moreover, productivity software is becoming more social and collaborative. The new version of Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail program, will connect users to updates on the social networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn.
Google has been pushing its cloud-computing Google Apps services to governments and corporations, with a global advertising campaign urging companies to “Go Google”.
Source:http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7115205.ece
