Microsoft has been touting cloud-based application development for quite some time, but with Office 365 on the web in beta for a few months, the expected release has been somewhat underwhelming, and can lead you to expect that the quick release was less a product completion statement than desperation to have something available to compete with Google Docs.  Overall, reviews haven’t been going well for the software giant.

Google Docs has been a friend of UMPC, Android, iPhone, and Windows Mobile users for quite some time with both browser support and apps, which can be a blessing as the bulk of the application remains on-line and doesn’t have to be installed to the device to be used, but Office 365 currently is only compatible with Windows Phone 7 devices and only the newest versions of Windows (XP SP3, Vista and 7) and Mac (Leopard and Snowleopard) operating systems, setting them far behind Google’s far wider outreach to older PCs or portable equipment.Furthermore, the software itself is very lacking in features ,with the Word element barely showing any features beating Wordpad, the free word processor included in almost every recent Windows version.  Excel has very limited formulas and structuring, and no graphing capability at all.  And PowerPoint is so stripped as to be almost useless.

Understandably, for a cloud application set, size matters, and some trimming needs to be done to keep web loading times short, but the flaw is that Google has put together a set of Office-like tools that are very stable, very functional, and still load quickly, and for Microsoft to have launched Office 365 early (and demanding paid subscriptions after your 30 day trial) while the set is so young and raw seems to be putting Office as the last choice any user would pick.

The video below, supposedly “accidentally released” from a Microsoft marketing conference, may explain the arrogance that pushed them into releasing as soon as they did.

From: GeekBeatTV

Source: Microsoft Office 365