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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."
It isn't mentioned in the article, but does anyone know if Office365 "works best" with IE or is it browser-agnostic? For example, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access is quite decent when accessed with IE but with Firefox or Safari it's not nearly as nice.
Trolling is a art,
http://office365.microsoft.com/
$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.
No, it just means that it doesn't work on leap years.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I assume the next version will be Office 366. How long have I been asleep?
Guess that covers Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access. So what's the rest, then ? Visio ? Exchange ?
Well, it is really a bad name per my understanding.
To keep up with the trend, they should try "iOffice", "FaceOffice",
^(oo)^pig~
I'm surprised it's taken this long to get this kind of offering and price point out -- it's seemed clear for a while that Microsoft would like to grow a presence in the "software as a service" space.
I'll install OpenOffice 500 times and you can pay me the $36k. Deal?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
I misread the title as "Office386", and was thinking, "Boy, Microsoft really is falling behind the curve".
Table-ized A.I.
Gates: "365 days a year otta be enough for anybody."
Table-ized A.I.
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.
No, it just means that it doesn't work on leap years.
Sort of like the PS3?
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.
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.
You forgot to factor in the 25GB Exchange online mailboxes and Sharepoint Online for each user that doesn't come with Office Professional.
This space for rent.
Oddly enough I don't know anyone who uses VBA.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Imagine the board decision meeting.
... which are alive ... eh lets name it "Live ........
Seattle moderator: Right, we wanna shov... sell our Office sofware [sic.] to the wider public and we need a name. You John?
John: Well, how's about we name it Office %VERSION%++
SM: Very good indeed, John... You Mark?
Mark: It's for the people
(Several hours pass)
SM: (Yelling) Oh for god's sake, we can't name everything 360, can we!
Some nobody: (Very meek voice) 365 maybe? For the year, you know? OK, I'll get my coat.
(Several more hours pass)
SM: (Desperate) OK, 365 it is.
Another nobody: (Very softly) And what about leap years?.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
From TFA :"$27 per user per month"
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".
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
They're going to be so screwed when the service goes down for an entire day every four years. Ah, but then they'll introduce Office365+.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
All you need to do is install this 1.2 GB active x control. Or you can opt for the 1.6 GB active x professional version that includes "web bob" and "clippy".
Got Code?
It's never going to be better.
Seriously.
If Oracle were to put together a team of absolute superstars - I mean real development gurus - and head them up with the best project manager they can find - and give them just one task - "Make OpenOffice import and export seamlessly to Microsoft Office formats, including all scripting and macros", it still wouldn't be better.
For one, Microsoft would suddenly start to find patents they could sue Oracle for infringing.
For another, the next version of Office would change things, drastically. There'd be an Office XML format "version 2", and it'd make version 1 look like a paragon of well-thought out design.
For a third, by the time such a feature made it into the stable version of OpenOffice, the two things I've just listed would have already happened. Twice.
Like it or not, we live in a world where people want to share information digitally, and that sharing has to work. Microsoft's rules say you do this by running an office suite on your PC that saves files to a known format and you collaborate by sharing those files in some form - be it through Sharepoint or, if you're more old-fashioned, by email attachment and storing on a fileserver. Thing is, if you play to those rules you're more or less guaranteed to lose. This is why Google Docs doesn't and it's why Microsoft are frightened of Google. Google are playing to their rules and Microsoft haven't had to compete on someone else's terms in a very long time.
There are a few types of programs I would expect to lose functionality when I lose internet access. MMO games, an internet browser, email.
There are some I would expect to always be functional regardless of internet connection. Media players, single-player games, and office suites are some examples.
You must be part of my generation of older computer users who still remember what it's like to not have always-on, high-speed broadband access streaming everywhere.
I guess my point here is there's no point in worrying about the "what-ifs" when you lose internet access, because for todays generation of internet addicts who are tethered online with no less than three devices within 17.5 meters of their body at all times, the answer to your question is very simple; nothing will get done. At all. It'll be mass hysteria in the office when users realize they're disconnected from Facebook and Twitter for more than 34 seconds.
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.
For people starting with nothing any office product will work. If you already have files from application , it is often better to stay with that application then switch. If you can justify the cost of the switch, then do it. If you cannot, then do not.
I use open office at home, and install it for most people that ask for office. Does it work for them yes. Then again these are not people with hundreds or thousands of files from a different office application. Have I been burned by this? Yes. When docx, xlsx, and pptx arrived it caused some problems. Asking the person to have the sender resend in the 97-2003 file format was a bit harder. Tell them they need to do a save-as not just save. I set the default to 97-2003 for the office 2007 installs I did at work. That worked for most people. Why word has to use the new format for the math equations (with the Green symbols) is beyond me though. Main point is, use what works for you.