You may have missed it, but Microsoft has been running a beta of their own online office suite, called Office 365, for the last year. Yesterday, it officially lost the beta tag. There are some great features, but here’s the catch – unlike Google Docs, you pay for Office 365.
To be honest, my first response was “yeah, good luck with that.” Integration with the next version of Windows Phone 7 is well and good, but what kind of user base are we talking about there, exactly? The other features all exist for free elsewhere, down to the ability to connect to an Exchange server.
On further review, my first response was wrong. I was thinking of myself as the target audience, and I’m not. Office365 is aimed at the small business, with a user base that needs access to the same exact apps in the same way, but may not be able to afford a license fee for each copy of Microsoft Office. It’s actually a great way to cut down on piracy and a good revenue stream. Office 365 reduces overhead for the user companies as well, as they don’t need a dedicated IT staff to run their Exchange server. Google Docs is well and good, but when you’ve got people who were raised in the MS Office environment (read: office drones, non-techs), it actually has a learning curve. This won’t.
If MS opens Office 365 up enough to let it run on other platforms, you could see a real adoption in the small business market, as well as the education market. This program I easily dismissed before turns out to have some real potential.
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