Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

He calls upon entrepreneurs to work hard, innovate, be bold, and take risks. He is fascinated at the prospect of education meeting neuroscience. He thinks you can train your brain to learn more things. He’s an avid reader; he starts more books than he finishes. And, he managed to get a good 3G connection while on a Safari in the jungles of South Africa, this spring.

A man of varied interests, he’s worked and lived many many technologies over the years.

Meet Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s server and tools division, a division that builds and runs the company’s computing platforms, developer tools, and cloud services. Nadella leads a team of over 10,000 employees, and his group alone makes $19 billion in annual revenue – which is more than the combined revenues of Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, Netflix, and a few others in the Valley.

While you’ll think $19 billion in revenues is huge, Nadella is often found telling his folks, “We’re only doing 19 billion of 2.2 trillion dollars of IT.”

Technology trends have significantly changed from when Nadella joined Microsoft over 20 years ago. He remembers it was all about business process automation and communication driving productivity in the previous generation.

But he says the key trends emerging now are software defined data centers, application platforms, storage, and big data. Ten years down the line, he envisions the most innovative work happening around the conversion of data into meaningful insights and actions.

At Microsoft, he believes in continuously re-inventing, and in the nexus of concept, capability and culture. He mentions how Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer always stress on doing what is relevant.

We caught up with Nadella at TiEcon 2013 to talk strategy, cloud, and more. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

VentureBeat: What are the key initiatives that your division is working on?

Satya Nadella: One of the divisions I run is the infrastructure side of Microsoft, and whenever you run infrastructure the best way to stay grounded is to look at the applications that are being built for the next generation. In our case, historically what has shaped what our division does is our own applications — for example, Exchange, Lync, or SharePoint. Now, in this next era, things like Xbox Live, Bing, Office 365 are defining what we’re doing in infrastructure.

So there are four specific things that we’re working on: One is the modern data center because now you’re managing compute, storage, and network as a unit at data center and multi data center scale. People refer to it as a software driven data center, and to us that’s a key part. Next layer is the data… we need to have a very first class data platform. Then above that, you have to have a very modern application platform for building mobile, social, and data driven applications. Lastly, we want to make all these applications available on any device while giving IT the ability to secure the access and the data. These four things are what we call the “Cloud OS.”

VentureBeat: How do you think cloud is changing the buying decisions of corporate customers?

Nadella: There’s a significant change in the following sense: Cloud makes production of backend computing much more friction free because if you want to spin up a server, you can spin up a server as a developer very easily because of the elastic nature of some of these public clouds. Some of the friction that existed to get going in order to be able to have access has changed. Also, applications built in the cloud for the business decision maker… SaaS applications like Azure and Office 365 are so much easier. In fact, there are a number of customers that are using Office 365 who never bought a server from Microsoft. So this is the first time they are able to take Exchange capabilities because they never installed an Exchange Server, but Exchange as a service makes it that much more palatable for them.

So that transformation that business decision makers and developers are able to rely on applications as infrastructure is a fundamental change. I still believe IT has a significant role because we go from provisioning infrastructure to governing infrastructure, so it’s still very relevant because you can’t have every department, every developer inside a company storing the data in the cloud. You need to have visibility into it, you need to be able to have some amount of compliance controls in it. IT needs to play that role while at the same time end users, business decision makers, and developers have uncontrolled access.

VentureBeat: Talking of “cloud” in Microsoft’s context, how’s the adoption of Windows Azure been? Can you share some numbers and statistics around it?

Nadella: The way I would sort of characterize it is that the Microsoft Cloud is made up of both Office 365 and Windows Azure. First of all, Office 365 relies on Windows Azure for lots of extensibility and core infrastructure.

If you’re an enterprise customer, you’re really choosing a vendor; you’re not choosing a product because some of the most critical data and business processes are inside this cloud. Office 365 is on a billion dollar run rate. Recently, Telephonica, our big customer, moved over to Office 365, which is significant.

With Azure also is has been significant.  Azure AD, which is the directory, has got 2.5 million entities. That means anyone who is a subscriber to Office 365 would also be a tenant in Azure AD. That means any entrepreneur can do a single sign on with those 2.5 million businesses.

We’ve had significant momentum in the last six months – storage and compute capacity has doubled, we’re adding 1,000 customers a day, Windows Azure in its own right has built a lot of momentum, and it’s both compounding at a pretty fast rate.

VentureBeat: How does it compare to Amazon Web Services?

Nadella: I think Amazon has done a good job. Amazon does a lot of business on Windows as well. The key thing for us — where some of our natural strengths are — is this combination of server to Azure and Office 365 to Azure, both of which are pretty unique to us.

If you look at Amazon or Google, the two other providers in the cloud, we have a very unique way to tell a customer that it is not just about building an application in the Azure platform but [also] having a way to take it out or to extend it.

I don’t think distributed computing will somehow get locked up in one data center or even 100 data centers in one company. It is going to remain distributed because of the diversity of needs. SLAs, the laws of physics, and the regulatory environment will demand that applications and infrastructure be spread out more efficiently.

So this hybrid cloud, I would say, is one very unique value proposition, and that matters a lot to enterprise customers. If you’re an Office 365 customer and you’re doing SharePoint and you want to extend SharePoint, that nexus with what we have is again unique; you’re an Xbox game developer and Azure is a unique way to extend. So a bunch of things that we’re doing are different.

VentureBeat: How is mobile and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) influencing the server business?

Nadella: In a pretty fundamental way. If we look at what used to happen in the enterprise, it used to be that the PC and server [were in the same domain on-site] at the company and that ensured real security and real identity. Now, once you start saying that your data and your applications are accessible on personal devices, then you have to really create that security and compliance.

So, between what we’re doing with Systems Center and Windows NT and Azure AD is consumerization of IT infrastructure. In an enterprise, an IT professional can ensure that they can allow [employees] untethered access to their applications and data on any device at the same policy control because you really don’t want to stop employees from bringing their own devices. While you let employees do that, you still want information assurance because you can’t have the employee walk away with some of the secure data. That ability is now possible with all the work we’ve done in Azure AD.

VentureBeat: What is Microsoft’s future roadmap? And, how do you see your division playing out in the bigger picture?

Nadella: We broadly as a company are moving from a software company to a devices and services company, and that’s really the transformation, both in terms of technology and delivery – as well as business model. What I do, what our division does is very central to this. We’re providing all of the infrastructure for all of the services that are enabled across both the consumer and the enterprise space in the company.

Photo Credit: Microsoft News Center

According to the company’s research, it takes an average of 40 hours to completely move a business to Office 365, the online Microsoft product suite that includes Word Online, Excel Online, Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online. SkyKick was founded by executives from Microsoft’s Office and Bing teams who left in 2011 to build an automated solution that would make the transition easier.

“Moving Microsoft’s SMB Office base to the cloud is a massive undertaking and will require high engagement from Microsoft’s vast partner base,” said CEO Evan Richman in a statement. “SkyKick takes what has traditionally been a two to six week IT services project and makes it more transactional and scalable creating a win-win market scenario — any Microsoft partner can easily and profitably move their SMB customers to Office 365, giving SMBs a great experience at a great value.”

During its private beta, SkyKick helped move thousands of businesses to Office 365 using three products that take clients from the planning stages through to full implementation. WebPlanner is a project management application that helps customers plan the migration process. Migration Sync moves customer account and user data, like email, calendar, contacts etc … to Office 365, and Outlook Assistant is geared towards the “last-mile challenges” that often impede the migration process.

SkyKick is headquartered in Seattle.

Photo Credit: John-Morgan/Flickr

While “Blue,” the code-name for the next release for Windows and several other Microsoft products, has been getting a lot of play lately, the new generation of Office has been labeled as “Gemini.”

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley writes today that Gemini encapsulates the next generation of updates for Office that will be coming down the line in the next few years. This very well could include apps that have the “modern” Windows 8 interface that is better designed for touch than the desktop versions it offers now. Microsoft already offers OneNote and Lync as modern Windows 8 apps, but staples like Word and Excel have not been given that treatment.

In the past few months, Microsoft released new versions of Office 365 and Office 2013 for consumers and businesses. But if Foley’s sources are correct, we’ll only have to wait until the fall to see updated versions of Office programs associated with Gemini.

It appears that new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will all be out this fall, with other programs getting touched next year. This release will coordinate with the release of Windows Blue, a big upgrade to Windows 8 that fixes some of the more annoying problems in that operating system.

Microsoft will be holding its next Build conference on June 26 through 28 in San Francisco. We expect to hear details about Blue and Gemini there.

Top photo via Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft has launched a new campaign to hook students on Office 365 University by offering up six months of the service and an extra 20GB of SkyDrive cloud storage for free.

The latest version of Office 365 launched in late January and is actually quite good. Microsoft’s latest pricing on Office 365 University gives students a pretty killer deal — pay $80 and you can use Office 365 for 4 years on two devices. Students can re-up the offer one time, so they could theoretically get eight years of Office 365 for just $160.

Today’s new offer is likely designed to introduce students to the benefits of the latest Office, including SkyDrive’s cloud storage, a more touch-friendly design that works with tablets and touch-screen laptops, and collaboration tools. Microsoft will give each student three months free, but they can get another three months by sharing the offer on Facebook. (You could probably share it on Facebook and then delete it after you get the extra three months without any consequences.) Any student with an .edu email address can sign up now.

The push for students to use Office 365 University includes a new ad featuring Parks & Recreation star Aubrey Plaza. In the ad, Plaza tells a group of college students to use Office and SkyDrive to work on their group projects — and goes on to insult each of them.

Check out the spot below.

After launching a new version of Office 365 for consumers a month ago, Microsoft has now opened the doors to small and midsize businesses wanting to subscribe to its cloud-connected version of Office.

I found the latest version of Office 365 for consumers to be quite good and full of great features (read my Office 365 review). The apps look and feel like the ones we’ve been using for years, but they have more functionality and work better with touch screens than any prior version. The new app suite is so feature-rich enough that the state of Texas recently signed a contract to bring more than 100,000 employees online with Office 365. Now more businesses and governments can get access to the new Office.

“This release unlocks new scenarios and delivers capabilities that far surpass anything available in browser-only solutions,” Microsoft Office Division President Kurt DelBene said in a statement clearly targeting Google Apps, Office 365′s biggest competition.

The business version of Office 365 is available today in 69 markets and 17 languages. Microsoft says it will launch the service in another 20 markets and 16 languages in the second quarter of this year.

Office 365 options for businesses

Businesses will have three options if they want to get on the Office 365 bandwagon:

Office 365 Small Business Premium — $150 per user per year ($12.50 per month)

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, InfoPath, Access, and Lync

Microsoft touts this as an option if you have 1 to 10 employees. On top of the Office apps, you get “business grade email, shared calendars, website tools, and HD video conferencing.”

Office 365 Midsize Business — $180 per user per year ($15 per month)

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, InfoPath, Access, Lync, Exchange Online, Lync Online, and SharePoint Online

The Midsize package costs more than the other options, but it does come with more features than the rest. Optimally designed for 10 to 250 employees, Office 365 for Midsize Business makes it easier to administrate every employee’s accounts with Active Directory integration, a web-based administration console, and business hours phone support.

Office 365 ProPlus — $144 per user per year ($12 per month)

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, InfoPath, Access, and Lync

ProPlus is the big-boy option for businesses and can support any size that gets thrown at it. It doesn’t have Exchange Online, Lync Online, or SharePoint Online for employees, but it still offers a lot. Every user with a licence can use their Office 365 account on up to five devices, and there are IT tools for administrators.

Check out more photos of Office 365 below.

Businessman running with laptop via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Looks like connecting the world’s top document software with the cloud is paying off. Microsoft has announced that more than one billion Office documents are now stored in SkyDrive, following the launch of Office 365 Home Premium last week.

SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for consumers and businesses. To account for the growing reliance people have on the cloud, Microsoft made it so that Office 365 simultaneously saves documents to a local hard drive and SkyDrive to make sure your documents are always backed up. That set up has clearly increased SkyDrive usage, along with the growing number of SkyDrive users using Windows 8, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps.

Microsoft Group Program Manager Omar Shahine writes in a blog post today:

Last week Office 365 Home Premium launched and we’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm over the seamless integration of SkyDrive for saving and sharing your docs. Recently we reached a big milestone; our customers are now storing over a billion Office documents on SkyDrive! We’re really excited about the feedback we’ve seen around the new version of Office and the deep integration of SkyDrive. We’re taking it a step further today by announcing a new feature in SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps that allows a more seamless sharing and editing experience for our customers.

The new sharing and editing feature is relatively minor, but we’ll take any feature that makes our lives a little easier. Microsoft has made it so that all recipients you send a SkyDrive “edit link” to will be able to make changes to a document in Office Web Apps without signing into a Microsoft account. Ideally, that makes editing and collaborating on documents using SkyDrive less of a hassle.

Have you tried SkyDrive or are Dropbox and Google Drive more your thing?

Powerpoint image via Microsoft

Which means that a memo on the status of storm relief efforts can now contain live updates to weather conditions, emergency response units’ actions, and news coverage of the disaster. In other words, documents are becoming more like web pages.

The five new apps Microsoft is releasing today are designed to integrated with 365′s big capital-A applications: Excel and Word. One, Bing Maps for Office allows you to plot people on a map with a data visualization tool that integrates right into Excel. People and locations show up on a live map, embedded in your spreadsheet, that can be zoomed and switched to Bing’s bird’s-eye view.

Another, also for Excel, allows you to build a live finance portfolio which includes current pricing data showing you how much richer — or poorer — you are every day:

Source: Microsoft

Bing Finance for Office

For Word, Microsoft is releasing three apps that allow you to search for related news and videos right inside a document, search for and insert images into your document directly from the web — no copyright issue here, naturally — and access the most up-to-date online dictionary and grammatical information.

Source: Microsoft

Bing News Search for Office

You have to think that the addition of apps to Office 365 is the continuation of the evolution of documents from static entities that only change when you change them, to living creations that that can update themselves. And by giving documents apps, Microsoft essentially is transforming documents into apps … all the while and not incidentally giving you, me, and any Joe Blow Nonprogrammer the ability to build things that only short years ago would have required extensive development.

Not only is Microsoft is making office productivity tools more like the web, it’s giving us the ability to create mashups of data and analysis and visualization on the fly.

Expect more apps for Office in the near future.

photo credit: Microsoft Sweden via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The unveiling of Office 365 Home Premium may be a giant step for Microsoft, but analysts say Redmond still has a long road ahead in its effort to regain consumer confidence.

The new Office 365, which became available yesterday, is a subscription-based version of Microsoft’s venerable, profitable productivity suite, with the addition of copious cloud-based features.

Microsoft had to make this overhaul of Office due to increasing competition from online productivity services such as Apple iWork and Google Drive.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer called it “Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service.” The cloud-based approach means that Microsoft can release updates more regularly rather than being stuck in a three-year release cycle.

For $100 per year, consumers and small businesses can access all the Office apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, OneNote, and Access — from up to five devices, including tablets, Macs, and PCs.

There’s also a subscription aimed at college students, called Office 365 University, which gives four years of access for up to two devices for $80.

In addition, Office 365 adds in the company’s InfoPath and Lync Online tools for instant messaging. Vanessa Thompson, research manager for analyst firm IDC, said those additions are minor but important updates, and bring the new offering in line with Google Apps.

But by adapting its product to how we work now — in the cloud and across multiple devices — Microsoft wants to recapture the consumer and small business market.

But will it succeed?

Will consumers bite?

Analysts we contacted agreed that the low annual subscription fee and bonus extras (such as 60 minutes of free Skype calling, and an upgrade in SkyDrive storage from 7GB to 20GB) will appeal to consumers.

Still, Redmond needs to push its marketing efforts into high gear.

“Microsoft will need to go to great lengths to convince users that its online offering has feature parity with its desktop software,” said Phil Black, a program manager at the Urban Business Initiative, a group that instructs small businesses about new technology.

Black stressed the importance of offering “specific examples” for how users will be able to take advantage of the cloud-based features in the new release. He predicts that consumer adoption will be slow at first but will pick up as Microsoft learns to navigate the “tricky pathway” from desktop to cloud.

It’s also a smart move to offer a version of Office 365 aimed squarely at college students. It comes at a better overall price and lets students install the software twice. Microsoft will be able to build loyalty with a tech-savvy demographic that might otherwise experiment with Adobe, which is also jumping onto the cloud bandwagon.

Lincoln Murphy, managing director of cloud consulting firm Sixteen Ventures, sees another potential benefit: the reduction of “rampant piracy.” He said the low annual price point will deter people from illegally downloading popular apps like Word and Excel.

The verdict? The low price will put downward pressure on competitors to offer equally high-quality services at an even cheaper rate.  Murphy said Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud is a “win” for consumers — “in many ways, Office 365 could be the rising tide that lifts all boats,” he said.

How about small and medium-sized businesses?

Analysts view this release as a means for Microsoft to get a “legitimate foot back in the door” with small businesses.

“Small and medium-sized businesses view the cloud as the future but were probably wondering where one of their most trusted vendors was when looking at options,” Murphy explained.

Thompson makes the case that the software as a service (SaaS) model and Lync integration puts the new Office 365 in line with Google Apps. However, “incentivising users away from a freemium competitor product that meets up to 80 percent of their needs is a consistent challenge for Microsoft,” she said. “Expect them to continually iterate on pricing and packaging.”

Black warns that widespread corporate adoption (as Microsoft moves up-market) won’t be immediate.

“IT departments know that Microsoft releases the first version of any software before performance and stability testing is truly complete,” he said, adding that Redmond will need to prove it is “truly committed to a hosted model of its Office software.”

The verdict? Microsoft has emphasized in messaging that the cloud-based Office is intended for consumers. As the company shifts focus, expect to see highly-targeted efforts to reach small businesses, who view cloud-based business technology as the future.

Microsoft finally launched the consumer versions of Office 365 and Office 2013 this week. But, you ask, is it really worth the cost? In many cases, the answer is — surprisingly — yes.

The way most of us have used Microsoft Office over the years has stayed the same, but the software suite is changing radically, with a hard emphasis on getting consumers to subscribe. Trying to adapt to increasingly mobile consumers, Microsoft wants you to have Office everywhere you go and wants you connected to the cloud.

Microsoft’s answer to this problem is Office 365, which is a subscription version of the new Office 2013 software. Office 365 gives you subscription access to the software, and you can use it from a number of devices (up to five devices for the one-year, $100 consumer subscription; or two devices for the four-year, $80 student edition — see details below). It adds a couple of cloud-based and instant-messaging features. But otherwise, its components are the same as those of Office 2013, which is a more traditional software package ($140 and up for a permanent license that you can install on a single PC).

I’ve tested Office 2013 and the new Office 365 on a Windows 8 tablet and a Windows 7 PC, and it’s a clear evolution of the software. It addresses mobility, the multidevice lifestyle many professionals live, and connections to the cloud much better than the 2010 version of Office and the previous Office 365.

Still, you ask, why the hell should I subscribe to something when I can just pay once and be done with it? Bear with us for a minute as I explain.

Pricing and programs

First up, let’s talk about the cost and what programs you actually get with each Office option that’s being offered as of this week.

Here’s the breakdown of what you can get:

• Office 365 Home Premium: $99 per year — five devices — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access
• Office 365 University: $80 for 4 years — two devices — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access
• Office 2013 Home & Student: $140 — one device — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote
• Office 2013 Home & Business: $220 — one device — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook
• Office 2013 Pro: — $400 — one device — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access

With that out of the way, I can dig into why you might be better off by subscribing to 365 rather than buying a single copy of Office 2013.

New features in Office 2013

Since Office 365 is essentially subscribing for access to all of Office 2013′s programs and some bonuses, let’s talk about what’s new in 2013.

First, the suite’s polish emphasizes clean design, large fonts, and thinking of what you need before you need it. The ribbon interface first introduced in Office 2007 is still around, but it now has larger text and a way to easily minimize the ribbon if you want it hidden.

Handy features in here firmly enhance the experiences of each app. One feature that helps you through each app is a new start screen that pops up when you start Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other suite programs that shows popular template options. One feature that helps in PowerPoint is the new Presenter View, which previews slides and other info on your PC’s screen while giving a presentation. In Excel, an awesome feature called Flash Fill auto-predicts the info you’re typing in cells. And in Outlook, Peeks lets you hover to view your calendar without actually leaving the inbox.

Office 2013 is also designed to better work with touchscreens, and some elements are larger to account for tapping instead of clicking. However, between touchscreen use and using a traditional mouse-and-keyboard, I would much rather control it the traditional way. Maybe my fingers are too large, but it was often frustrating to tap the right options I wanted. Microsoft needs to work with some talented interface designers to make a completely touch-focused of this software.

Office Apps are another new aspect of Office 2013. You can install these apps to add new functionality and third-party interaction to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or more. Take a look at some of the apps you can install below.

Reasons to subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium

Here are several reasons why I think Office 365 is a good deal for $100 a year:

Multiple devices: It works on five devices, including PCs running Windows 7 and 8 and Macs running OS X 10.5.8 or later. For those of you, like me, who have multiple devices and don’t want to buy a copy for each, this is a great solution. Imagine if you have a desktop and laptop and need Outlook. Two copies of Office 2013 Home & Business will cost you $440 up front. I’d much rather pay $100 a year in that circumstance.

Office on Demand: Office on Demand is a feature that enables you to use Office on a Windows 7 or 8 PC that is not one of your five installs. For example, if you are at a friend’s house or a satellite office, you still have access to Office. Once you sign in to your Microsoft account on Office.com, Microsoft streams a copy of Office from the cloud down to that computer and you can save your work to the cloud. When you are finished with your Office on Demand session, the copy disappears and removes all traces you were there.

Cloud connectivity: Office 365 is super-connected to the cloud. When you save a document in Word or Excel, it saves simultaneously to SkyDrive and to the computer’s hard drive. That way, no matter where you access a document, you have the latest version of it on hand. Office 365 subscribers also get 60 free Skype minutes per month and a boost in SkyDrive storage from 7GB to 20GB.

Updates: While a standard copy of Office 2013 will get security updates, the software in Office 365 will continually be updated with many more features.

Students get a killer deal: Office 365 University is a fantastic value for students at $80 for four years. You only get two device installs, but Office on Demand means you can use it on many other PCs. (Like the university computer lab.) Microsoft says it will let students renew the deal a single time, which helps if they need extra time to get their degree or go to grad school.

Using Office 365

In several days of using Office 365, I’ve rather come to like it, although I experienced a few hang-ups. Installation was not hard and only took a few minutes on my Windows 7 desktop PC over a wired connection. While it was still finishing the installation of the programs, Office immediately let me use the majority of those programs if I was seriously impatient.

Using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the other programs was reminiscent of using older versions with thoughtful additions. As noted above, the new features in Office 2013 are handy, and after using certain tools, it would be hard to go back. After using Form Fill in Excel, I can’t imagine ever trying to do serious spreadsheet work in something other than Excel. I don’t use spreadsheets often, but I’m sure those that do will love Excel 2013. If you’re a someone who gives a lot of presentations as part of your job, you’ll likely get a kick out of PowerPoint 2013 because it offers more features and the Presenter View is smart.

I tested Office on Demand on a Samsung ATIV PC running Windows 8. It actually didn’t work as well as I wanted because my wireless Internet connection often wasn’t fast enough to download and stream the programs. After waiting for several minutes for Word on Demand to open up, it finally started letting me write a document. While I was writing the doc, it would sometimes become unresponsive while it was loading data. When I had a strong Internet conneciton, the service was more responsive and was easier to use.

Overall, Office 365 works smoothly and mostly as advertised. Once small businesses can get in on the action (more on that in a bit), it could be a compelling option for them if they aren’t already aboard the Google Apps train.

Reasons to skip Office 365

While we think Office 365 is generally a good deal for those who need powerful productivity software, I have some good reasons for you to skip it.

First, if your needs for productivity software are extremely simple, you have no reason to invest this much money in Office. You can easily use Google Docs or OpenOffice for free and get basic document, spreadsheet, and presentation editing. But if you want the most features and versatility, Office programs like Excel and PowerPoint are much more powerful.

Second, being tied to a subscription service could make some folks nervous. What if your subscription expires? Will your data and programs disappear? As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley points out, Microsoft will notify you that your subscription has not been renewed and will permit the download of any documents in the cloud to your hard drive. The Office programs themselves will enter a “read-only reduced functionality mode,” so you won’t be able to fully use them like you once did until your renew.

Another reason to skip? You truly only need a single copy of Office and don’t want to be on the hook for subscription costs. Let’s say you have just one home PC and you only need Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for your productivity needs. It would be better to purchase a single copy of Office 2013 Home & Student for $140, and you’ll have it for life.

Finally, if you already have a copy of Office 2010, you probably don’t need to jump on the Office 365 bandwagon just yet. However, give it a few more years and you might want to get in. Those who have Office 2007 or before actually should consider the upgrade since there have been so many improvements since that release.

What’s next on the Office front

Microsoft plans to announce pricing and details for Office 365 for small businesses on Feb. 27. The company hasn’t explained how it will differ from Office 365 Home Premium yet, but we suspect it will offer various group editing and collaboration features in the cloud.

We also expect Microsoft is hard at work on full-fledged touch-based applications for iOS, Android, and Windows 8/RT platforms. Microsoft has routinely denied that native iOS and Android apps for Office are coming, but leaks and rumors suggest otherwise. We will see.

Wrap-up

Office 365 is the right move for Microsoft and shows a willingness to give a lot in order to attract subscribers. For $99 a year, you get access a constantly updated version of Office that accounts for having multiple computers and the chance you’ll need to use Office on a PC that isn’t yours. We think a lot of consumers and business folks will dig it.

Check out more images of Office 365 and Office 2013 below:

After teasing its launch for many months, Microsoft has finally released several consumer-focused versions of Office 365 and Office 2013 to 162 markets.

After Windows, Office is arguably Microsoft’s most important product and helps the company make a lot of cash. Office programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are staples around the world for productivity, and while compelling alternatives do exist, these apps are still the standard for how we get work done.

But times have changed since Office debuted in 1990, and Microsoft is trying to adapt to how we work now. We’re much more mobile, we have more devices, and we’re more likely to subscribe to software at a reasonable price than pay a ton upfront. (Adobe has noticed these trends too.)

So Microsoft is offering different plans for the newest version of Office and trying to coax consumers and students with a relatively decent subscription deal. Or you can get into Office “the old way” and buy a single copy for a single PC.

Here are the details on how Microsoft is now offering up Office 365 and Office 2013.

Office 365

Office 365 Home Premium — $99/year — 5 devices

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access

Microsoft is prioritizing Office 365 Home Premium as its top offering for consumers. With it, you can install a copy of the software on five different devices, including PCs and Macs. The software ties itself to one Microsoft account and lets you use that account to manage it in the cloud.

Office 365 Home Premium is cloud-connected in several ways. For example, when you save a document in Word or Excel, it saves simultaneously to SkyDrive and to the computer’s hard drive. That way, no matter where you access a document, you have the latest version of it. Office 365 subscribers also get 60 free Skype minutes per month and get a boost in SkyDrive storage from 7GB to 20GB.

Additionally, subscribing to Office 365 gets you an ingenious feature — Office on Demand. Essentially, whenever you are on a Windows 7 or 8 PC that is not one of your five installs (let’s say you’re at a friend’s house or a satellite office), you will still have access to Office. Microsoft actually streams a copy of Office from the cloud down to that computer and you can save your work to the cloud. When you are finished with your Office on Demand session, the copy disappears and removes all traces you were there. (We wish this worked on Macs too, but hey, can’t win ‘em all.)

“We want to drive the most demand for this,” Jevon Fark, senior marketing manager at Microsoft told VentureBeat. “This is easily the most ambitious version we’ve ever offered in the 25-year history of Office.”

Office 365 University — $80 for 4 years — 2 devices

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access

The company will also offer a version of Office 365 aimed squarely at college students. It is basically the same offering as Office 365 Home Premium, but it comes at a better overall price and only lets you install the software twice. You’ll also get the convenience of Office on Demand, which could come seriously in handy in university computer labs, which may not have the latest version of Office installed.

Frankly, Office 365 University looks like a killer deal. Microsoft says it will let students re-up on the $80-for-four-years offer a single time, which helps if they need extra time to get their Bachelor’s degree or go to grad school.

Office 2013

If you’d rather pay a large amount upfront and not have to subscribe to get your software, Microsoft also is offering Office 2013 Home Premium in three other versions. Think of these versions as a more traditional approach to Office. If you just want a single copy that can only be installed on one PC, this is your software.

Keep in mind, Office 2013 is not as cloud-connected as Office 365. You don’t get Office on Demand and your documents don’t save simultaneously to SkyDrive and your hard drive. You can, however, save your documents just to SkyDrive if you want.

Office 2013 Home & Student — $140

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote

Office 2013 Home & Student will be the overall least expensive offering in the new Office family because you get the most basic Office programs and simply pay $140 for the life of the product. It offers the bare bones package though.

Office 2013 Home & Business — $220

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook

Small businesses that want to approach Office from a more traditional perspective of buying a licence or two for those who need a new copy might want this version. Office 2013 Home & Business is targeted at smaller companies rather than medium-sized companies and enterprises.

Office 2013 Pro — $400

Programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access

If you’re a serious Office aficionado and need the full suite of Microsoft tools, Pro is your version. Unless, of course, you’d rather have the same programs and get extra goodies by subscribing to Office 365. Chew on this: Pro costs $400 and only lets you install on one device, while 365 Home Premium lets you install on five devices with more cloud features. If you use Office 2013 Pro for four years, only then do you make up your investment when you could have paid the same for four years of Office 365.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft isn’t shy to admit that paying $400 for Pro isn’t a good deal. “My understanding is that we don’t want people to buy Pro for $400 — we want people to subscribe to 365,” Fark told us.

How it runs

The final copy of Office 365 Home Premium runs quite similar to what we saw previously when testing Office 2013. This is the Office you’ve known (and maybe liked) for years, but it has a more compelling design and more features. One feature that really stuck out was PowerPoint’s new Presenter View, which lets you preview slides and other info on your PC’s screen while giving a presentation. (You can partially see Presenter View in the top photo.) Another feature is a new start screen that pops up when you start Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more that shows popular template options.

What makes the latest version of Office a bit different besides the cloud-connected features is that it’s also built with touch in mind. Microsoft wants you to use this software on its Windows 8 tablets like Surface as well as Windows 7 and 8 PCs. You can change the settings that optimize icons and options for touch. But exclusively using touch can be a recipe for frustration — I found it challenging to input lots of numbers or prepare a presentation. I’d much rather use these programs with a mouse and keyboard.

More business support coming

Next up, Microsoft will launch the latest version of Office 365 for businesses on Feb. 27. The company hasn’t divulged details on how it will differ from Office 365 Home Premium yet, but we suspect it will offer various group editing and collaboration features in the cloud. When we find out, we’ll let you know.

Check out more views of the new Office 365 and Office 2013 in the slides below.

He knows technology, having been a computer programmer, and he knows business, as an economics major and a successful business owner. He’s also a candidate for President of the United States of America, believe it or not.

(I did say eccentric genius.)

So when he skewers a tech company, he skewers a tech company. Here’s today’s strip — it shouldn’t take you long to figure out who this one is targeting:

Source: Dilbert.com

Dilbert for November 6

Microsoft, of course, has recently redone both its corporate logo and its iconic Windows logo. And, surprise, surprise, Microsoft has just released a new tablet computer.

Adams raises two questions: Is no-one buying Microsoft’s Surface tablets? And is Microsoft on a long slide toward irrelevance?

First, on Surface sales …

Microsoft certainly thinks it’s going to sell a decent number of tablets, since the company is putting its money where its mouth is and building three million units this year. Three million may not sound like a lot in a tablet market that already has 100 million iPads, but Apple only sold three million in its first quarter of sales, and that was in a market with very little competition.

Surface tablets have drawn some reasonable crowds, with some even getting as giddy as new iDevice owners, and reports of solid if not spectacular sales. And yes, Oprah has endorsed Surface, calling it a “wowser.” With some positive and some negative reviews — OK, more negative than positive — at least people are talking about it.

Realistically, we don’t know what Surface sales will be until Microsoft announces some more details. But it seems likely that the company is going to have decent sales at least, and further iterations of the product — that is, after all, a Redmond specialty — will improve.

So no, it’s not true that no one will buy it.

Second, on the future of Microsoft

In the long term, every company dies. That’s life .. . or business, rather.

And Microsoft will never again be the one dominant force in the market that it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. The market has moved beyond that, and there are too many players in at too many levels. It’s not all about operating systems anymore, and it’s not a binary model: PC vs Mac, or rather, Microsoft vs. everyone else.

But irrelevant?

That’s a big stretch. And I get that a cartoonist is looking for a metaphorical truth, not a literal truth. But it’s hard for a company with a $250 billion market cap to be irrelevant. Especially when that company still holds dominant positions in desktop operating system, home gaming systems, and office productivity software, not to mention its large array of enterprise products.

Microsoft may very well have some pointy-haired bosses. Most companies do. But Steve Ballmer, you may have noticed, is bald.

photo credit: Ol.v!er [H2vPk] via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Verizon Wireless is making a strong bid for small businesses today with the announcement that it’s offering Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite.

Verizon made the announcement together with Microsoft at a small press gathering in New York City today. Office 365 is now a part of Verizon’s Small Business Essential’s portfolio, and it bundles together such features as email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and document sharing, all based in the cloud.

“Really, it’s the small business, it’s the real estate brokerage firm…even that pizza shop that’s been on the corner for the last 30 years…. It’s those small businesses that are really fueling our economy, those small businesses that are really important to Verizon,” said Mike Schaefer, Verizon’s executive director of product development. Shchaefer added that Verizon Wireless’s 4G LTE network makes mobile productivity software more useful than ever.

With Office 365, small businesses receive powerful productivity tools that are normally reserved for bigger firms that can afford Microsoft’s hefty licensing fees. The suite supports Windows and Mac desktops as well as iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.

Microsoft’s desktop Office suite currently has 1 billion users, but Office 365 has the potential to reach 4 billion users across 88 markets, according to Jeff Anderson, Microsoft’s senior product manager of Office 365 syndication. (Editor’s note: We’re not sure where he’s getting those numbers, because there aren’t 4 billion people with computers in the world, meaning Anderson’s aspirational market is larger than the entire computing universe right now. Perhaps he’s envisioning a distant future when replicants are everywhere and Microsoft software is widely used in the off-world colonies.)

He noted that over 90 percent of Office 365 customers have fewer than 50 employees, hammering in its usefulness for small businesses.

The cloud suite is “on track to become the fastest growing product Microsoft has ever had,” Anderson said.

Verizon customers have always been able to sign up for Office 365, but today’s announcement highlights a significant partnership between Microsoft and Verizon. If customers get Office 365 through Verizon, all of the charges go directly to their Verizon bill, and they’ll also get a custom domain as part of the setup process. Verizon also has its own customer service representatives for Office 365 users (they won’t be able to call Microsoft for support, Verizon reps tell me).

Microsoft hasn’t been afraid to go after Google’s  apps directly in its war to dominate online productivity, and a key partnership like this could land it some loyal small business users. We’ve previously argued that Office 365 has the potential to clobber Google’s apps — and it’s deals like this that could make that possible.

Verizon is offering Office 365 at Microsoft’s standard price of $6 per user, and it’s available to businesses starting today.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Not only is Microsoft serious about the cloud, but it’s also serious about keeping its customers in the government happy. acknowledges

Today the company announced a new version of its cloud-based document software suite Office 365 for Government. Essentially, government version does everything its consumer counterpart does, including Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Office Professional Plus, and more.

“We also know that security and privacy play a big role in any decision to move to the cloud,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post announcing the new version. “Today, Office 365 supports the most rigorous global and regional standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, EU Safe Harbor, EU Model Clauses, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the US Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).”

By September, Microsoft said it plans to add support for IPv6 on Office 365 as well as support for Criminal Justice Information Security (CJIS) policies.

It’s in Microsoft’s best interests to start scaling out its Cloud based document service to compete with the likes of web-based Google Apps. VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig previously pointed out that the service was perfect for smaller businesses, so targeting the government is a big step up. Also, the service will need to remain online without fail.

More importantly, Microsoft probably wants to hold on to all those government services that use the latest non-connected version of Office. If it can prove to the government that it’s a secure platform for which to share and collaborate on important documents, it could very well carry over to the business sector.

Many companies are still hesitant about using cloud services due to security concerns. Vaultive wants to calm those fears by encrypting data before it goes to a cloud server.

Vaultive’s product is Vaultive for Hosted Exchange, which was created specifically for host exhanges such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange 2010. All data sent to a cloud service is encrypted before it leaves a company’s network or workstations. With Vaultive for Hosted Exchange, encrypted data can also be indexed, sorted, and processed by a cloud service without the need to decrypt it. Vaultive’s security measures help companies comply with strict privacy regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) while using cloud services.

Vaultive faces competiton from CipherCloud, which also encrypts data before it reaches cloud services. CipherCloud currently works with Salesforce and Google Apps.

The new funding comes from .406 Ventures, New Science Ventures and Harmony Partners. The company was founded in 2008 and was previously in stealth mode.

The company will use the new influx of money to grow its New York office, adding to its sales, marketing, and technical teams.

In addition to its New York presence, Vaultive has a data center in Tel Aviv, Israel with more than 20 engineers. The company raised a previous round of funding for $1 million in 2009 from Yaron Carni, Fabrice Grinda, and Founder Collective.

Vault image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft has gone after Google before in ads attacking its search and Gmail products, but today the big M has launched a new off-kilter commercial showing off Google Apps’ biggest weaknesses.

The video, titled “Googlighting,” portrays the Google Apps productivity suite in human form as “Googen Apperson,” a slimy salesman who shows up an hour late to his appointment. Apperson has 12 years of advertising experience and is meeting with an executive to sell her company Google productivity software. The executive asks a lot of tough questions, and Apperson squirms in his chair, unable to answer most of them.

Without mentioning it by name, the video is trying to attract businesses to Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software. Office 365 brings Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Exchange, and SharePoint to the cloud and aims to make collaboration for teams easy. Outside of having more familiarity with businesses, Microsoft is hoping to position its software as better for your company’s privacy in light of Google’s recent controversial privacy changes.

Personally, I didn’t find the ad that funny, but it does make a lot of fair points. While Google Apps is cheaper that Office 365, it still has quite a few limitations. Chief among them is that Microsoft Excel is miles ahead when it comes to spreadsheet creation and management. Excel might be boring on its face, but it is one of the most important applications used in business today. In my hands on with Office 365, I made the case that Excel in the cloud could be the number one reason businesses choose Office 365 over Google Apps.

You can watch the full ad here and leave your comments below:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft will soon let select customers and companies try out builds of Office 15, the next generation of Office software, the company announced on its Office Exec blog today.

Microsoft’s Office suite of software is one of the most important (and profitable) products the company sells, so each new major release is a big deal. Microsoft has sold about 200 million Office 2010 licenses since its launch 18 months ago, as spotlighted in Microsoft’s latest quarterly report.

Details on how different Office 15 will be from Office 2010 are scant at this point, but we fully expect smarter integration with the promising cloud-based Office 365 product and always-on cloud capabilities.

“At this early point in our development cycle, I’m not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division,” writes PJ Hough, Corporate VP of Development for the Microsoft Office Division. “With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.”

The technical preview release of Microsoft Office 15 will go out to select customers under non-disclosure agreements. The company will then launch a public live beta “later this summer.” ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley says Microsoft is targeting a release for Office 15 by the end of 2012. Microsoft is reportedly not sure if it will call the product “Office 2012″ or “Office 2013″ to be in line with previous edition names.

Microsoft declined to give us access to anyone to talk more about Office 15 outside of what was discussed in today’s blog post.

Microsoft Office launch photo via Microsoft News Center

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

University of California, Berkeley, that hotbed of civil unrest as well as academic achievement, has become the latest university to move from its old-fashioned e-mail system to the Google Apps for Education cloud.

The decision is part of the university’s goal to save $75 million a year in operational and technology expenses. Switching to a web-based email and calendar system will contribute about $500,000 annually to that savings, according to Shelton Waggener, the chief information officer for the university.

Berkeley isn’t being shy about why it chose Google Apps over the competing Microsoft Office 365.

First, Google provides the Google Apps for Education suite for no charge to schools and universities. The entire suite — Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and even the Google+ social network — will be provided to Berkeley students, faculty and staff for free and with no advertising, forever. It’s up to the school’s administrators which aspects of the suite actually get deployed, but in principal, the entire suite is available.

Moreover, as Berkeley’s internal IT teams spin down the existing CalMail and CalAgenda systems, the school is expecting to save on infrastructure costs by cutting out costly, redundant services. Some users may have to stay on whatever’s left of CalMail even after Google Apps is in place for legal reasons (UC Berkeley handles a lot of sensitive government contracts, after all), but the vast majority of users will move to Google’s cloud.

“We’re thrilled that UC Berkeley has decided to switch to Google Apps for Education. Google Apps was designed to help people work — and learn — better together, and we look forward to bringing our suite of cloud-based communication and collaboration tools to the UC Berkeley campus,” Tom Mills, a Google director responsible for Google Apps for Education, told VentureBeat in an e-mail.

No one at Berkeley is saying exactly how many people they will move to the new system, but UC Berkeley’s current Wikipedia page pegs student enrollment at around 36,000, so one could guess that all told this deal would be for around 50,000 seats.

As for why UC Berkeley picked Google Apps over Microsoft Office 365, well, the university literally has a list. In short, Google offered a quick migration plan, freedom for Berkeley to handle its own deployment with support from its colleagues at UC Santa Cruz and Lawrence Berkeley Lab who are already using Google Apps, support for the Box cloud file syncing product that Berkeley has a contract with, and so forth.

By contrast, Microsoft wanted too much change to Berkeley’s existing e-mail infrastructure and too much additional expense managing the on-premises infrastructure that Office 365 requires to operate at the scale that Berkeley’s talking about.

It’s worth noting that Berkeley found Microsoft to have better calendaring, better security and better integration with traditional tools, but in the final analysis, Google got the nod.

On the official Google Apps project site, Berkeley promises that a more detailed migration plan is forthcoming in January 2012. Meanwhile, students and staff will continue with the current CalMail and CalAgenda systems.

This plan has no bearing on Berkeley students’ and faculty’s ability to get Microsoft Office under the school’s Microsoft Campuswide Software License. In fact, university officials expect to see the Google cloud and Microsoft desktop software live in harmony.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the savings from switching to Google Apps. The $75 million savings is the total amount expected from Berkeley’s overall Operational Excellence program, which includes many other initiatives.

Image credit: Lynn Watson/Shutterstock

Cloud-based software suite Microsoft Office 365 on Wednesday suffered its first major outage since its introduction in late June.

“At approximately 11:30am PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers,” said Steven Gerri, General Manager for Global Foundation Services, in a statement. “We worked to isolate the issue and we are beginning to see service restoration. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue.”

Microsoft additionally confirmed the outage via its @MSCloudUS Twitter account:

“We apologize for the inconvenience that the #office365 outage has caused today,” the account wrote. “We’re [sic] are working on resolving the issue.”

Office 365 is Microsoft’s first major play into the cloud office software scene and it is trying to establish itself as a better option than Google Apps, so outages during work hours are definitely not a good thing. In my hands on review of Office 365, I praised the service for its depth of features and its accessibility for startups and small businesses. The service promises 99.9 percent up time, so hopefully the issue does not happen again soon.

Are you an Office 365 user? If you are considering the service, does this outage deter you?

Update: As of 4:38 p.m. PDT, Microsoft said all systems were back up, meaning the outage occurred approximately five hours.

If you’re a small business or startup, Microsoft Office 365 should be on your technology shortlist. It’s a cloud-based suite based on the world’s most popular office software that launched in late June. It will likely get small businesses and enterprises to start considering cloud software solutions if they haven’t already. Microsoft also hopes this offering can edge into the space Google Apps has had to itself for several years.

After testing the suite’s small business tools for several weeks, I’m convinced that it’s a strong option for small businesses, startups, and enterprises. It’s possibly even better for small companies than Google Apps. With a promise of 99.9% uptime, generally reasonable pricing, a deep list of features, and rich cross-application compatibility, I can see many businesses wanting to use Office 365.

Opinions are mixed on just how useful the Office 365 will be to small businesses and nimble startups. Our own Matthew Lynley made the case that startups with young personnel that grew up with social networking won’t see Office 365 as the ideal solution for them. But frequent VentureBeat columnist Peter Yared argued that Office 365 will clobber Google Apps and similar cloud software options because it has familiarity and considerably more features.

The pricing for Office 365 packages is wide-ranging, perhaps too much so for its own good. Pricing starts at $6 per user per month for small businesses under 25 people. At a step up, the cost for medium- to enterprise-size businesses ranges from $10 to $27 per user per month. This is considerably more than competitor Google Apps, which charges $5 per user per month no matter how big the company.

Office 365 pricing plans escalate when companies need to add more features. If a user needs more powerful features than the ones provided in the cloud-based Office Web Apps, the company can pay more for a monthly subscription to Office Professional Plus, which is the latest desktop version of Office. A business with under 25 employees pays $18 per user per month, while businesses with more than 25 employees pays $24 per user per month to rent the latest desktop version.

A lot of the cloud-based tools available in Office 365 were previously available under the less-catchily named Business Productivity Online Suite. Office 365 improves on those tools by updating Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to include the features of the 2010 desktop version, whereas BPOS had its software bits based on the 2007 versions.

The online services that 365 specifically offers are Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Office Web Apps. In addition, there’s a set of Web Apps, which are slightly slimmed down versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are accessible through a web browser.

Next: The Good and The Bad of Office 365

Pages: 1 2 3

In a bigger-than-usual case, Microsoft has handed out $250,000 to the University of Nebraska to switch its e-mail, office, and calendaring programs to the just-introduced Office 365, according to InformationWeek.

Office 365, a suite of Microsoft’s well-known Office products tailored for the cloud, seeks to bring businesses and large-scale clients into the era of cloud computing. Making the University of Nebraska a spotlight for Office 365 use will help Microsoft make the case to other businesses that 365 is useful and ready to run.

Nebraska chose Office 365 over IBM, which had been providing the school with services via Lotus Notes, and Google, which has its own lower-cost-but-less-established Google Apps.

The funding will go toward migration, consulting, licenses, and a Microsoft Premier Support plan. After the move is finished in 12 to 18 months, using Office 365 will save the school an estimated $500,000 a year.

The funding came from Microsoft’s Business Incentive Funds program, which is not often talked about but is available to partners, resellers, and customers that need an extra incentive to sign a long-term contract. Nebraska has been using IBM’s Lotus Notes since 1997, so you can see why the school needed an extra push to move to a new set of software.

Would you like to see your school or business start running Office 365?

Contrary to Google’s narrative, cloud based office software is still a wide open market. The three million businesses that have “Gone Google” — proclaimed on billboards in San Francisco airport’s new Terminal 2 — are for the most part Gmail users, who are still happily using Microsoft Office and even Microsoft Outlook. Gmail is a fast, cheap, spam-free and great solution for business email, especially relative to the expensive, lumbering email service providers. Google Apps has definitely found a niche for online collaboration, but generally for low-end project management types of spreadsheets and small documents. The presentation and drawing Google Apps are barely used.

Yes, there are definitely Google Apps wins, since it seems cheap. On implementation, businesses find that switching to Gmail is one thing, but switching their entire business infrastructure to Google Apps is a completely different animal that goes far beyond simply changing how employees are writing memos.

Imagine you are a 25-person law firm in Kansas City running Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange for email and calendaring, Windows Server for file sharing, SharePoint for wiki/collaboration, and have a custom billing application written in .Net and running on Microsoft SQL Server. Like the majority of small to medium-sized businesses, you are an all-Microsoft shop.

Google comes in and presents: Google Apps looks primitive and doesn’t have all the features of Word and especially Excel and PowerPoint. It also doesn’t work offline. Email and calendar is sort of the same, but you should really use a browser instead of Outlook to get full functionality. Plus, you have to manually move all of your SharePoint content over to Google Sites, the file server isn’t integrated with the Windows or Mac desktops, and you have to keep your .Net app the way it is or rewrite it into Google AppEngine.

Compare this experience to the Microsoft value prop: go home on Friday, and on Monday when you come back everything will look the same, except now we are hosting it all and you can lay off your IT staff. There’s no training required. Employees can run apps on the desktop or in the browser, whichever they like, and the browser version looks like the desktop version, only cheaper. For a regular business where technology really is just a pain and an expense item — not a mission in life —  it’s really a no-brainer. In addition, Microsoft has historically been very smart about seeding nonprofits and educational institutions with copies of software that are virtually free, which it will likely also do with Office 365.

The thing about Microsoft Office 365 is that it looks really good, and look and act just like the well-known native Office apps. The ribbon interface is intuitive and the apps are fast and responsive. Google Apps, conversely, looks like it was made by college students from a weekend project. I don’t understand how Marissa Mayer loves fashion like Oscar de la Renta at night, but goes to work during the day and insists on data-driven web sites that look like crap. Google hasn’t shipped a good user interface since Google Maps. The different between Office 365 and Google Apps is glaring.

Microsoft definitely has a few issues to work out. As Google pointed out, collaboration is not very simple, since you have to be a Microsoft Office 365 subscriber in order to collaborate. However, Microsoft already launched Docs.com, a free Office offering with free collaboration. Microsoft will likely integrate Skype into Office 365, which will offer chat, audio and video conferencing, screen sharing and (probably) free document collaboration based on Docs.com.

Google’s claim that Office 365 doesn’t support many platforms is moot. It works fine on my Mac OS X with Chrome, and officially supports Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. Office definitely has numerous pricing tiers. The lowest tier is on par with Google Apps and the higher tiers include subscriptions to the desktop software, which help to transition Microsoft from feature-driven bloatware to subscriptions —  a model that has worked for Adobe.

Google Apps will definitely have a place for new businesses and small businesses with younger employees that aren’t tied to the Office user interface. Google App Engine is a hidden jewel within Google Apps and its hands down the fastest solution for programmers to create and deploy a comprehensive web app. However, with Office 365, Microsoft is clearly on a trajectory to continue its Office hegemony. Microsoft is much more concerned about Apple than Google at this point, and insuring that it monetizes Apple devices like it used to make more per Mac than Apple did in the early 1990s. Conversely, Google should be much more concerned about Microsoft, which now has almost 30% marketshare in search.

Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. You can  follow him on Twitter.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s online office suite, Office 365, finally hit the streets Tuesday. But it’s about five or six years too late to the cloud-based office software game and unlikely to provide much benefit to smaller and mid-sized companies, according to a number of executives of large enterprise software providers.

Microsoft has the edge in familiarity because many of the world’s largest companies already use its Office suite of productivity software. But while that may offer Microsoft a foothold in Fortune 500 companies, it doesn’t help it win over smaller companies that might become tomorrow’s Fortune 500 companies.

“You have to aim down-market when you develop new software,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer at Salesforce.com, a pioneer in cloud-based enterprise software. “Only the smaller companies have the agility to employ new software, and larger enterprises all want to pick up the software that’s popular with smaller companies.”

Larger companies are more comfortable with software that has been around for a long time, Collins said. It’s easier to get a huge company with 20,000 employees to spend $10 million on an Office productivity suite rather than experiment on newer pieces of enterprise software like online collaboration software Yammer, he said.

“Microsoft has relied on CIOs that can spend a $100 million IT budget without thinking,” Collins said. “The Internet has changed distribution and individuals just buy software that makes sense to them.”

But most startups and smaller enterprises employ a host of smaller enterprise software providers, like Box.net and Yammer, rather than a single productivity suite like Office. Those services are designed with the end-user experience in mind and are much more user-friendly, adopting lessons learned from social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter. Services like Box.net and Yammer are also typically much cheaper than deploying large office suites like Office 365 and offer their users many more options.

Salesforce.com markets its products toward the entire spectrum of enterprises, Collins said. But when the company is designing new elements for its software, such as its online collaboration software Chatter, it develops it with smaller enterprises in mind. That’s because many smaller enterprises today are employing workers just out of college that will move on to become the next wave of office workers, he said.

“There’s a lot of people coming out of college and universities and they walk into companies, and it’s like a computer science museum of crap they need to work with,” Collins said. “They’ll say, this is just not the way that I work with people, and they’ll feel lost.”

Office 365 isn’t going to win the hearts and minds of the next generation of office workers, said Scott Weiss, an investor with VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz who focuses on enterprise software. Office 365 will mostly feature incremental improvements, but it won’t have the kind of breakthrough features like Google Apps brought to market when it launched, he said. And that isn’t because Microsoft is late to the cloud game — it’s because massive suites like Office just aren’t sustainable any more, he said.

“If Office was awesome and perfect, the fact that it’s delivered in a browser wouldn’t even matter,” said VMWare chief technology officer of cloud apps Javier Soltero. “The fact is that office suites like this have just run out of gas.”

Office 365 should be relatively successful because Microsoft has a huge reseller network that it has to plow through before it’s able to bring a new product to the market. That’s a large part of the reason why Microsoft has been so successful in selling new versions of its Office software. There’s a large food chain that benefits from reselling and integrating applications with Microsoft’s Office software, Soltero said.

That’s also the reason why it took Microsoft more than five years to finally release a cloud-based office suite. The whole suite has to serve as an anchor for its other business software rather than an innovative new class of software, said Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud storage provider Box.net.

If there’s anything good to come out of Microsoft’s cloud announcement, it’s that the whole notion of cloud computing will become more widely accepted, Levie said. Cloud computing has only been widely accepted by enterprises and tech-savvy individuals and hasn’t yet hit mainstream audiences, he said. Microsoft’s announcement today — coupled with Apple’s iCloud announcement — should make the technology more visible to typical consumers and other businesses that haven’t employed cloud computing technology.

“Microsoft and Apple out there using the ‘cloud’ term is just making the market bigger,” Collins said. “And it’s making the market bigger for something that Microsoft isn’t good at. And the second that Apple used the word iCloud, that was seminal moment in the industry.”

“Everyone in the consumer world hasn’t yet used this cloud term — your girlfriend, your kids, your grandmother — but that term is now out there in a totally different world and it’s forcing people to rejigger how they think about stuff.”

Office 365 is an online-based service that shares similarities to Google Apps and Zoho, and it lets people collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and e-mail using a combination of subscription desktop software and web apps. Microsoft’s popular applications like Word, Excel, Exchange, and PowerPoint will now be able to be licensed month-to-month with an online version.

Pricing starts at $6 per user per month for small businesses. The cost for medium to enterprise-size businesses ranges from $10 to $27 per user per month. This is considerably more than competitor Google Apps, which is $5 per user per month no matter how big the company.

A lot of the cloud-based tools available in Office 365 were previously available under the less-friendly name Business Productivity Online Suite. 365 improves on those tools by updating Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to include the features of the 2010 desktop version whereas BPOS had its software bits based on the 2007 versions.

The online services that 365 specifically offers are Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Office Web Apps. The set of Web Apps are slightly slimmed down versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are accessible through a web browser.

Google’s similar Google Apps suite of cloud-based programs offers online e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, and more. Yesterday, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha made the case on a company blog that Apps was a better overall product. Sinha’s main issues with 365 were that it wasn’t built for teams, it costs more, it only focuses on Windows-based platforms, and it has too much dependence on desktop software rather than being 100 percent in the cloud.

Each suite of apps has its own strengths. Google has an edge on price and the ability to work on all platforms, but Microsoft has the edge on familiarity and deep features like Excel formulas and macros. It will be fascinating to see what sort of adoption rate we see in the next year between the two services as more businesses invest in cloud-based systems and software.

Are you interested in checking out Office 365? Would you consider moving from Google Apps to try 365?

Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud-based service that’s similar to Google Apps and Zoho, which gives users the ability to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and e-mail using a combination of subscription desktop software and web apps. Google started its actions against 365 last week when it announced integration between Box.net and Google Apps.

Google knocked 365 as a product built for individuals rather than for team collaboration. It pointed out that users must buy individual licenses to collaborate, where Google Docs only requires a Google account to access. “With Apps you can work with multiple people in the same document,” Google’s Sinha writes. “There’s no need to worry about whether or not it’s possible to share a spreadsheet, or co-edit a presentation. You can see people type in real time, and share a file in just two clicks.”

Another chief complaint is that Office 365 is optimized for Windows PCs and devices instead of working equally on all platforms. Google claims to support almost any device or operating system with Apps.

Those who care most about pricing will be interested Google’s point that Apps is always $5 per user per month, while Office 365′s minimum fee is $6 per user month and increases depending on which plan is selected. “We have a single, transparent, low price that meets everyone’s needs, and it hasn’t changed in 4 years,” writes Sinha. “No extras for basics like phone support and robust productivity apps. No long term contracts or opaque enterprise agreements.”

Finally, the last major criticism Google has of 365 is that Apps is built for the web while 365 is meant for the desktop. “You can’t just take legacy, desktop software, move some of it to a data center and call it ‘cloud,’” Sinha writes. “Apps was born for the web and we’ve been serving hundreds of millions of users for years.”

While I see why Google is trying to get ahead of 365′s push with some relevant criticisms, it may still prove hard to convince users who have used Office for 15 years to make the switch. I’ve also talked to a several business users that use Excel frequently who have complained about lack of spreadsheet features in Google Docs.

What do you think about Office 365 and Google Apps? Do you plan to give Office 365 a try?

Rather than getting all their office apps from one vendor, he said, the best strategy in the enterprise space — and now the consumer space — is to find a service that wraps together the best apps from multiple companies that all do one thing very well.

Box.net (which specializes in enterprise cloud storage) is moving in that direction by adding the ability to access and use files from other companies like customer relationship management software provider Salesforce.com and Google Docs, an online document editor. That’s also a strategy that companies like Microsoft and Apple seem to be avoiding, Levie said.

“With iCloud, Apple’s … seeing the cloud as a way to connect their devices together and their software,” Levie said. “We think it’s moving in the direction of openness, by combining the tools together and making it work seamlessly.”

iCloud is Apple’s next iteration of MobileMe, which will include access to online mail, contacts, and calendar applications. When a user makes a new contact or calendar entry on his or her iOS device, the entry is automatically put in the cloud and then pushed to all other iOS devices. If you ever change that information, it is automatically updated on all devices. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs also talked about three other new iCloud apps — Documents, Photo Stream, and iTunes in the Cloud — when he unveiled the service in June.

Levie said that Microsoft was attempting to do the same thing with Office 365, the company’s online version of its flagship Office software. It’s a cloud-based version of Office and gives customers access to document editing, email, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software under a single blanket.

Box.net’s strategy is to do one thing — cloud storage — and be very good at it. And if Levie’s prediction of where the market’s heading plays out, the company could see a big payoff. The startup seems to have investors convinced that it’s on the right road — it just managed to raise a $48 million round of funding that it will use to double its engineering and sales staffs. On the other hand, it’s difficult to discount Microsoft and Apple’s strategies — with market caps of $209 billion and $300 billion respectively, they certainly have a lot of weight behind them.

But Box.net does currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is also no stranger to mobile — as of January, its iPhone application recorded more than 250,000 downloads and its Android application had been downloaded more than 70,000 times.

“We can only build so much and of our limited time we want to be the best place to store and manage your data,” Levie said. “The competition thinks very differently.”

Office 365, which is expected to launch later this year, represents a major shift for Microsoft because it’s more than just another major Office release. Instead, it combines features like subscription access to desktop Office software (Office Professional Plus, to be exact); Office Web apps; Exchange Online to synchronize mail, calendar and contacts; and SharePoint Online to let you share documents and manage a private intranet. And since it’s based in the cloud, it will offer you access to documents and services on mobile devices like phones and tablets

Office 365 is being positioned as the perfect solution for small businesses that don’t have dedicated IT departments and lack enterprise access to Microsoft services like Exchange (although there is an option for larger organizations). Microsoft promises 99.9 percent uptime, so it will also serve as a major test for the stability of the company’s cloud services.

Microsoft will offer two versions of the service, one aimed at small businesses and one at larger enterprises. The Small Business Office 365 will cost $6 a year per person, with an additional $12 per person fee for access to the desktop version of Office (a $499 value). It supports up to 50 employees, although it’s designed for 25.

The Enterprise Office 365 service will cost between $10 and $27 per person a month, has no user limit, and offers access to additional features like Active Directory and 24/7 telephone support. Microsoft will also offer a reduced version of Office 365 for kiosk workers (employees who don’t have dedicated computers of their own) for $4 per month per user.

Microsoft is also planning a version of Office 365 for education customers that will include 25 gigabyte email boxes, an online learning environment, as well as the features mentioned above.

You can sign up for a spot on the public beta test at office365.com. Microsoft says that over 100,000 organizations have already helped test out the service in limited beta testing, which began last fall.

I haven’t had a chance to try out Office 365 yet, but on paper it seems to be a noble effort by Microsoft to jump into cloud productivity. It remains to be seen how the service will fare against Google Apps, though, which already has more than 3 million businesses signed up.

Via PC World

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dear Google: If you keep this up, I won’t have any more excuses to be unproductive on my phone in transit.

Google announced today that Google Docs users can now edit their files in mobile browsers on iPhones and devices running Google’s Android operating system.

Google Docs users could already access their files and view them. They can now select a new edit function and add or remove information as they see fit. The functionality extends to Google’s Spreadsheets, a cloud-based version of Microsoft’s Excel, as well as its word document editor.

The mobile document editor is certainly useful. It allows people to edit their Google-hosted documents from anywhere. In theory. In practice, editing documents on a mobile device can be a real challenge. There’s the small screen to begin with, and the keyboard takes up most of the screen on most phones. Editing spreadsheets is particularly unwieldy, as the user interface changes to show very large text boxes.

Google Docs is already a strong player that offers a free collaboration service for businesses that have multiple employees strewn across the country. While one member of a team edits a document, other members can see the changes in real-time. Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter, two other huge players in the business collaboration space, already have mobile applications. With Google Docs already behaving as a collaboration service, the next logical step was to take it mobile.

Google doesn’t provide details about how Docs is doing, but it says the app has “tens of millions of users.” And Google Apps, the bundle of business tools that includes Docs, has signed up 2 million companies with more than 25 million users total.

Microsoft also recently brought all of its Office applications online in response to Google’s increasingly popular web document applications. The alternative Microsoft offered before release of its Office 365 suite was paying for its Sharepoint program, a file-sharing and collaboration tool that integrates with its Office suite. But with collaboration providers like Yammer and Google becoming increasingly popular, Microsoft has been forced to move its services into the cloud to compete.