Microsoft Office Thunder to Blast Google Apps Cloud
Want to know all about Microsoft’s Google Apps plan of attack? Go to the source! Jeff Raikes, president Microsoft Business Division, spells out how THE long reigning productivity application dynasty intends to preserve its Office “sweet spot,” despite wannabe Web-based interolopers.
How will businesses “take advantage of today’s increasingly connected world of work” if Microsoft has its way? The new and online improved–who wants only cloud computing–Microsoft way:
We believe that the future of technology at work will be a combination of local software on client PCs or on-premise servers, along with services available in the cloud. Our approach is to give customers the choice, flexibility and power of both software plus services. Think of it as a continuum, ranging from pure software to pure services approaches. Most customers will be somewhere in the middle.
Different customers will make different decisions and even customers with similar situations will make different decisions for what they want on-premise and what they want as a service form the cloud. Vendors of point solutions can argue for one approach or the otjher. But either-or-approaches don’t address all of the technology challenges and opportunities in today’s workplaces.
Contrary to blogosphere wishful thinking, there are NO Google Apps or Adobe Buzzword “barabrians” able to storm the Microsoft Office stronghold and the world’s software users are not reaching for the cloud to stop a supposed suffocating from “desktop office-product anchors around their necks.”
Microsoft has not taken its sweet time to “answer Google Docs,” it has carefully orchestrated an integrated, multi-prong Web enhanced plan of Office 2.0 attack that usurps Google’s core “selling point,” online collaboration!
After all, CEO Eric Schmidt has steadfastly insisted that Apps is NOT a Microsoft Office competitor, but only its better Web collaboration half. Why play around with cutesy Google Apps at all, then, if the big Office gun comes Internet collaboration enabled!
Microsoft on “balancing the power of the Web with the interactivity and performance of software on a machine with a powerful connnection”:
By combining elements of different types of software, this new generation of solutions can break thorugh the boundaries between the isolated islands of information within many organizations, while also enabling peole to connect easily and securely with partners and customers beyond the corporate firewall.
Despite typical blogosphere conventional wisdom portraying a Microsoft deemed to be ”ignoring” the supposed legions of individuals and businesses clamoring for Redmond to play the Google version of the Office Cloud game, the real software giant is responding to real world need for online-offline productivity interaction.
Microsoft doesn’t have its head in the cloud, and that is a good thing: If the cloud is really to reign Office Productivity supreme, why is Google spurring its users to download Sun StarOffice to the desktop, the MICROSOFT DESKTOP!
ALSO: Schmidt to Ballmer: Stop Stealing MY Office Collaboration Lines! and Google Chokes with Postini: Billion Dollar Office Apps Giveaway
UPDATE: YAY! InsiderChatter.com on WebbAlert: NO Google Barbarians at Microsoft Gate