Office available in the internet cloud
2013-01-29 21:02
San Francisco - Microsoft on Tuesday began letting people
subscribe to Office as a service in the internet cloud, shedding the need to
buy the popular productivity software on a disk.
"It's kind of a reflection of how most of us live
nowadays," said company official Oliver Roll.
"The same way you get instant access to movies or
music at Netflix or Spotify, you access your documents in the cloud."
Subscriptions to Office 365 cost $100 a year and allow
the suite of programs for documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other
tasks to be used on as many as five devices - in a nod to modern, multi-gadget
lifestyles.
"We should be able to get our content on all our
devices, and it shouldn't be a hassle," said Roll, who is the Office
division's general manager of communications.
Documents or other files created using Office programs
can be saved at Microsoft's online SkyDrive with storage space beefed up to
27GB for subscribers.
Office 365 also comes with 60 minutes of international
calls to landlines using online telephony service Skype, which is owned by
Microsoft.
"You get the rich Office applications on your
computer as if you had bought the traditional license," Roll said.
"The difference is you will be updated more
frequently; have the latest features and work across five devices instead of
one."
Microsoft launched Office 365 for businesses about 18
months ago, and companies large and small have been rapidly signing on,
according to Roll.
On 27 February, Microsoft will roll out a new business
version of Office 365 optimised for the freshly-released Windows 8 operating
system, the company said.
Office software in old-fashioned packaged disks also went
on sale on Tuesday.
Still, "I think there will be a point in the future
where nearly all, if not every one of, our customers choose to buy Office as a
service in a subscription," Roll said.
"There is so much value to working from wherever you
are, across all your devices, personalised and with software that is always up
to date."
The Office suite includes Word, Excel, and OneNote.
Shifting Office into the cloud comes as Microsoft adapts
to a world in which people are renting software on the internet instead of
paying to take home the kind of packaged programs on which the company's empire
was built.
The Redmond, Washington-based software giant's
competition includes a suite of online applications hosted by internet
powerhouse Google.
But "Office 365 is head-and-shoulders above anything
else out there," Roll said.
"That is why customers are choosing us; with Google
apps they are compromising and people don't want to compromise."
