Microsoft Announces Web-Based Office365 210
suraj.sun writes "Aiming to bolster its hosted software for businesses, Microsoft announced today that it is adding Web-based versions of Office to its collection of hosted software for business, Office365. It will also offer traditional Office as a subscription-based service. Microsoft is pricing the service as low as $6 per user per month, though that version includes only the Web-based versions of Office."
Its website (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That is low (Score:4, Informative)
$6 / mo = $72 / year. Considering Office Professional costs close to $400, this is basically a subscription model. Yes, the $6/mo is cheaper than $400 / 5 years.
If $6 / mo is *expensive*, then I'm not sure how people manage payroll.
Re:"Best with IE" or not? (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing more complicated than a "hello world" page is browswer-agnostic.
But it's also a pretty safe bet that it's not a true browser app (I'm not sure what that means), but will be Silverlight based. So on that front, so long as you're running a browser that supports Silverlight, you should get the exact same experiance. There may be more info in TFA, but it's down for me at the moment, so I'm just going to speculate wildly.
Re:That is low (Score:5, Informative)
When one consider that Office is $400 - $500 per license it is "half off".
Also I think it is more aimed at small business.
Fortune 500 can drop $500 a license per user no big deal.
A startup could preserve capital by paying $72 per year.
Re:That is low (Score:1, Informative)
Also known as retail prices.
Amazon - $215 [amazon.com]
Re:"Best with IE" or not? (Score:3, Informative)
This is more of the last few year's trend of making everything web-based just so the company making it can appear to be with the times of having everything web/cloud/subscription based with no real advantage
IE? nah, just Silverlight (Score:5, Informative)
Hotmail is controlled by MS. IIRC, about a year ago they started displaying PPS (and maybe DOC) attachments in-browser. They did so while promoting the "works best with Silverlight... install" here.
So they have gathered enough statistics on Silverlight and any failures in display that always come from end-user feedback. Now, they are ready to entice corporations. The corps will have to approve Silverlight for their outdated browsers, or be faced with the same "degraded" fallback interfaces that result in reduced productivity that you already noted with Outlook's non-native execution.
Re:Surprised it's taken this long: (Score:5, Informative)
LOL. A little tidbit of history that may not be widely known or at least not widely remembered - Microsoft has actually developed web-based versions of its Office product on at least 2 previous occasions, perhaps more. These products never saw the light of day, and for various reasons, strategic and political chief among them, the projects were axed, developers reassigned, and code tossed away then restarted some time later when somebody decided that NOW the time was ripe for a web-based office.
Amusingly enough, I believe one of these efforts was part of what was originally termed the ".NET initiative" and was called "Office.NET" at least as a working title - back when .NET meant anything and everything, before they decided that .NET actually was the class library and VM for their C# language. See, for example, this article [cnet.com] from back in 2002.
Remember what a confused mess the .NET initiative was? It's truly amazing how much Microsoft has had its head up its ass over the last decade. Windows 7 is the first decent product they've put out in *years*.
A friend of mine from college, a very bright guy, was one of the project managers on the Office.NET project before it got axed. Anyway, he was so frustrated by his experience with this project that I believe it was in part his reason for leaving Microsoft.
So... it seems like they finally followed through on this, but it's not like the idea just occurred to them recently. No, it's more likely they only decided to bring it to market now because of the cloud computing hype and the fact that the traction of OpenOffice.Org and other Office alternatives has them scared shitless (of course, OpenOffice has just fragmented itself and will probably manage to squander the traction they've finally obtained after all these years of effort).
The Numbers (Score:5, Informative)
I work for an New Zealand small - medium company. The stacks up thus:
Option 1. 20 seat Office 2010 enterprise license - $13,000 per annum
Option 2. Office 365. 20 x $27/month x $NZ Exchange = $8484 per annum.
Option 3. 20 OEMS with hardware purchase(assume 4 year cycle): $2500 per annum
PS: US readers will think I have these numbers grossly wrong. I havent. The cost of doing business in NZ is expensive. Option 1 could drop in price. I have already had an email stating this could change as they are keen to always "find a best fit for an organisation".
Re:That is low (Score:3, Informative)
A startup could preserve captial by using openoffice, and starting a precident of not getting locked in right off the bat.
"The cloud" is not the horse to back.
Re:"Best with IE" or not? (Score:3, Informative)
Hello there! I work on the Outlook Web App team. The version of OWA shipped in Exchange 2010 SP1 is supported in (and works equally well in)...
- IE 7+ (note that IE6 is not supported)
- Firefox 3+
- Safari 3.1+
- Chrome 3+
This is the version of OWA included in Office 365.
Source:
http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/bb899685.aspx [outlook.com]
Re:"Best with IE" or not? (Score:1, Informative)
If it works well under Firefox it will be good. Office is the one thing I miss on linux... Open Office creates a mess in a workplace were everyone uses MS office.
MS Office creates a mess in a workplace were everyone uses MS office - no trolling, opening a really old MS Word document works better with Open Office Writer than with MS Office.