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SEATTLE
— When
Microsoft
starts selling Office 2010 next year, the company will
take its workhorse software suite and move it one step
closer to its vision of cloud computing.
The
company confirmed Tuesday that the software will launch
in June, without a specific date.
In a
major shift, the launch will include Office Web Apps —
free Web versions of word processing, spreadsheet and
presentation software — to compete with Google Docs.
Microsoft
has also said it will release a new version of Office
Mobile for smartphones.
Those
steps represent a branching out of the Office suite as
computing moves increasingly beyond the personal
computer and toward the so-called cloud, where work is
done on the Web, with the data and applications stored
in distant servers.
Test
versions of Office 2010, also known as a beta release,
are now available for anyone to download from
Microsoft's
Web site to try out.
Office is
made by Microsoft Business division, which accounted for
32 percent of the company's sales in its 2009 fiscal
year, or
$18.9 billion
. The Office 2010 release will also includes new
versions of SharePoint Server, Visio and Project.
"People
have historically thought of Office as a desktop or PC
thing. With 2010 we are really focused on giving that
productivity experience across the PC and browser,"
Takeshi Numoto
, corporate vice president for
Microsoft Office
marketing, said in an interview last month.
The
company has said its vision for the future of computing
is three screens connected by a cloud—the PC, the
television and the phone. In the case of Office, though,
the company substitutes the Web browser for the
television.
Matt Rosoff
, an analyst at independent
Kirkland
research firm Directions on
Microsoft
, said the enemy of Office is not
Google
, but the Office clunker sitting in the garage.
"The
biggest threat is that companies will look at the
current version they have and say, 'It works good
enough. Why buy a new version?'" he said.
Rosoff
considers Office 2010 an "incremental"
improvement over the last version, Office 2007, which
redesigned its menu system with a graphical ribbon bar.
He said some companies are still using Office 2003.
Rosoff
does not think Google Docs is a short-term threat to
Microsoft
, given how many more features Office has.
"While
(Google Docs) has features that a lot of people use, for
a lot of users of Office there's one particular feature
that may be particularly obscure, but it's the one they
need," he said.
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