Windows 7, Office 14 and the future of the PC
Windows is for the PC, phone and web says Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie claims Microsoft can deliver "a complete experience across phone, PC and web first and foremost by building on the core OS platform" and the iPlayer app or the new Netflix service that lets you watch your movie queue online, on a Mac or PC, using Silverlight show that partners can use Microsoft tools to put the pieces together. But can Microsoft use its own platform to move online and continue to dominate the desktop?
Office on the web
The demo of Office 14 was the best indication so far that Ray Ozzie can move Microsoft into the online generation. Finally, Microsoft will have web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that let you edit documents in a browser (IE, Firefox or Safari on a Mac) with the rich Office interface rather than just viewing them.
The Office web apps won't have every feature from the Windows versions, but they'll have the ones that make sense online - including formulas and conditional formatting in Excel - and one day they might have extra features that only suit an online app.
Office web apps will be able to work with documents stored on Live Mesh, and you'll be able to collaborate with two or three other people in a document inside Word 14; you can both make changes at the same time and you can see where the other person is working and even click on their name to IM them. And you can select part of a document, like a chart in Excel, and publish that onto a blog as live data; update the spreadsheet later and the chart on the web changes to match.
Office web apps will run on Windows 7, they'll sync to Windows Mobile and they may be built on Windows Azure.
Like Windows 7, there's no date for when Office 14 will ship, but the web apps may be free if you use them through the ad-supported Office Live site, as well as coming as part of a subscription to Office Live services and as part of volume licences for business.
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Mary (Twitter, Google+, website) started her career at Future Publishing, saw the AOL meltdown first hand the first time around when she ran the AOL UK computing channel, and she's been a freelance tech writer for over a decade. She's used every version of Windows and Office released, and every smartphone too, but she's still looking for the perfect tablet. Yes, she really does have USB earrings.