Microsoft just showed off their vision of what Office 365 in the cloud will look like. As you can see, it looks a lot like Google Apps! That’s not a bad thing.
After a brief set up by CEO Steve Ballmer, Corporate VP Kirk Koenigsbauer gave this in-depth Office 365 preview. It looks good; as you can see, the the whole Office suite translates rather seamlessly into the cloud. The focus here is clearly collaboration, and each demo of Word, OneNote, Outlook, and so on shows a careful consideration for how consumers already expect to work together online.
The mobile demo was particularly cool – and shows Office 365’s real strengths. Windows Phone 7 collaborates in real-time with Office’s desktop incarnation, while iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices will be able to as well (mostly likely via web apps). It’s pretty easy to imagine business owners collaborating with one another on the fly with these technologies, especially since many of them, uh, already do with through Google Apps. But even though many of these solutions are already available and in the cloud, if you’re entrenched in Microsoft’s portfolio your own grass got a little bit greener. [Microsoft]