Microsoft Announces Web-Based Office365

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."

Comments

Re:"Best with IE" or not?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Their web site claims "Works with the devices you use most - including PC, Mac, Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry" but it doesn't say "Works well".

I'd think it would have to be relatively browser-agnostic to make that claim, but who knows?

Tell you what

[Weaselmancer]

I'll install OpenOffice 500 times and you can pay me the $36k. Deal?

Re:Tell you what

[Shados]

Sure, if you include 25 gb managed mailboxes for the 500 people with a 99.9% uptime SLA and 24/7 support, backups, failover, etc. That is going to be entertaining.

Re:Tell you what

[marcello_dl]

Windows apologists kept repeating the linux is too different mantra for years now they gotta defend the ribbon. Yay! karma exists.

Re:For $6 a month

[SudoGhost]

While that may or may not be true, I don't need to post as an Anonymous Coward to tell you that Office alone is overpriced for what it does, especially when there is a viable alternative for free, let alone this 'subscription' crap.

Re:Go ahead, attack MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.... Slashdot has become the moaning geek. Everybody yells and complains about MS and other non-open companies. There are people who works hardly in software like office... why to attack them? Don't like the price, don't buy it. Stop moaning please

In case you're not really an idiot, I'll spell it out for you:

We're the ones who get stuck supporting users of these apps.

We're the ones who get stuck building/maintaining apps/infrastructure written against them.

We're generally NOT the ones who get to decide what the team's/division's/firm's platform and standard apps will be.

NOW do you get it?

Re:'Only' the Web-based versions of Office ?

[gstoddart]

Good point. Google Docs has a word processor thats better because its free.

Man, I'll give you some human excrement for free ... that doesn't make it better.

Free crap is still free crap. Not saying that the Google app is, in fact, crap. Merely that "free" and "better" are on separate axes.

Server Error in '/' Application.

[vlueboy]

Ouch. That link is slashdotted or something, so all we got is that error.
Which was great, decent reminder that MS hosting all your office documents on the cloud reduces your company's effective ownership of the files. One day IT blocks the domain inadvertently, or it gets DDoS'd by anonymous, or the local spyware kills it in your hostfile, or all the phones and internet go down at the company because of a cut cable... so then what do the managers do to access their files?

Cloud indeed.

Re:"Best with IE" or not?

[oatworm]

What moron killed Works, and why?

A bloody genius, that's who. Between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition (only slightly more expensive than Works' retail pricing, not that anyone ever paid for it), Works doesn't make sense anymore, if it ever really did in the first place. Creating a watered down version of Office wasn't a bad idea, mind you, but making it incompatible with Office and pushing it as an OEM solution just caused a ton of frustration among people who rightly expected "Microsoft" products to talk to each other. Seriously, Wordpad has better .doc support than Works. Wordpad! That's inexcusable. When you factor in that the sole reason they used a different file format was probably to kill WordPerfect (same file extension - I doubt that was a coincidence), it just ups the malicious pointlessness factor up several notches.