Two weeks ago, Microsoft held an event in San Francisco announcing Office 365 (Broadcast in Silverlight. Cheeky.)
The word “cloud” was used quite a bit, and much of the cloud value proposition was presented: (No need to manage your own data center, no need to admin servers, etc.)
One couldn’t be blamed for thinking this was a Microsoft response to Google Apps.
But there’s little new user-facing technology in play here. Office 365 will not be available until 2011 (quarter unspecified), so much can change. But the picture being painted right now is that Office 365 is about offering some quite flexible, attractive licensing options to Microsoft customers, not about competing head on with Google Apps technology.
We were quite impressed with Microsoft’s recognition of different employee types within an organization who may need less Office to chew on (and a correspondingly smaller license footprint).
What left us wanting was lack of web-based strategy (feature complete web-based apps), and lack of inter-organizational strategy (low-friction collaboration with those outside your company, such as customers and vendors).
The Office 365 press and product websites are currently light on specifics. Microsoft is likely buying time to fill out its vision. But with enough reading between the lines, some things become clear: Microsoft is working to convert existing Office buyers to a remotely hosted Office experience. It’s not trying to convince anybody to stop using Google Apps, or that the Office can excel as a browser experience.
Over the next week, Rank & File will be making sense of the new Microsoft Office landscape in a series of posts. Microsoft is awash in Office brands: Office Web Apps, BPOS, Office Live, Lync, Office 365. Which are the truly new products? Which can be mapped to the ever-more seductive consumer experiences enticing employees away from their enterprise business suites? What’s coming, what’s going?
Join us as we catalog the chaos.
photo by talented Flickr user Sunfox.
