Microsoft Office Online

It seems that Microsoft is belatedly joining the online revolution that is cloud computing with the announcement today that they will be making some office applications available in an online form for 2009, applications such as Word and Excel will be available online and accessible through a web browser.

Microsoft are quite late to the game with this as lots of other providers have been doing this for a while including Google with their Google apps suite, others include Zoho with their equivalent suite of applications.

The cynic in me thinks that they are looking for additional revenue streams in a constantly maturing market. Office has long been the cash cow for Microsoft and I imagine they are seeing this taper off as they need to provide more and more compelling reasons to justify the large upgrade cost for existing users, by moving to the cloud they can build a monthly recurring revenue stream and also possibly acquire customers that they might not have picked up before due to the high initial cost of Office.

As with all these things there are lots of things to consider before jumping in and any information on this service is currently thin on the ground.

All things considered this is likely to be a good thing for some businesses but not others.