Yeah… it seems that the catfight is going to get more interesting by the day. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are putting their cash-cow app “Microsoft Office” on line. By 2010, a new lite version of Microsoft Office called “Office Web” will be available online for free.

Will the Cloud King shudders with fear? After all, the Desktop King recently encroached the Cloud Kingdom with their own search engine called ‘Bing’ and now they have put their most potent arsenal in the Cloud. (Office brought in US$4.5 billion of revenue for first quarter of 2009 out of the total US$13.6 billion earned by Microsoft)

Office Web will be part of the Office 2010 general release, which is slated for the first half of next year. And if your organisation is a ‘volume license customers’ – you can run it through your own webserver. Mere mortals like us though will have to access Office Web through Microsoft’s Windows Live portal.

ATL film Ahh… now I see the catch. I have to surrender my privacy and sign in with the trusted

Live service. Thank you very much…

How will you accept this new development? Personally, I’ve tried Google Apps. And with our standard of Internet connectivity in this country, it is a very frustrating experience. So I don’t give much thought about it and I suspect the same nonchalant attitude will be reserved towards Microsoft’s new project.

Really, if I want free office applications to do my work, I could just take out this month’s CHIP cd and install the free OpenOffice.org 3.1. They’ve improved a lot recently and I don’t have to be a slave to the Net to do my work. PS. just in case, we should also avoid the birth of Terminator’s Skynet Superman II: Director’s cut release .

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