Whilst I have been happily reviewing the full version of 2010 as time permits for a while now I have little interest in the web based version. (A bit pointless at best corporate suicide at worst would be my take.)
I was therefore somewhat surprised when I recently got a request to participate in a feedback survey based on my experiences with the recently released tech preview of the imaginitivly named web apps.
I guess my subconscious must have been helping me out by ignoring the invite email. That or its another false positive casuality of my email spam filters.
I think they are still under NDA as are the server components (not yet released (I think?)) so I won’t ask what others think of the technology.
What I will ask though is do you see much value in webbified versions of MS Office. I know they already made the UI in the real office very clumsy so the web version wouldn’t look too bad, but I’m still struggling to see the value.
How will the web apps increase MS revenue?
cheers
Simon
Smurf on Spreadsheets 
Sunday, 18th October, 2009 at 10:45 am |
Same for me. Received the email. But did not consider it because it smelled like free work for Microsoft to me.
As for the web version of Office, as long as there isn’t an Intranet version of the product, its only point is a marketing deterrence tool against Google Apps. Typical Microsoft.
If there is an Intranet version, I’m in favor of it.
Sunday, 18th October, 2009 at 11:51 am |
Re Intranet version :
Its Back to the future…..way back in 1995 I worked in a place where we had something called Excel(Office) for Workgroups (or something like that)
So we had a server having Novel and thin clients through which we could access the office programs. It was a) Slow, b) entire office stopped when the server crashed or was down for maintenance etc
We then moved towards fat clients….. and now its back to the future again
But the Web Version is even worse ….useful if you want to use Excel for creating a To Do list… any thing more complex would be a disaster.
Sunday, 18th October, 2009 at 12:31 pm |
Guess what most users of Excel use it for? Yep, making lists. This is why MS had to respond to Google et al, even if it means losing some revenue at the lower end.
The impoverished student making a list of pubs for this year’s pub-crawl, is next years junior consultant and in 15 years time is deciding what productivity products to put on the company’s laptops. Up until quite recently, MS Office had near total mind-share, and MS want to keep it that way if at all possible.
Tom
Sunday, 18th October, 2009 at 4:40 pm |
Sometimes, it’s not about making revenue, but about not losing ground in the battle. If I were Microsoft, I’d rather have people try out the free version of the Microsoft product, in the chance that when the wallet is full they’ll go for the real deal, rather than have them try and stay with Google docs…