Microsoft moving its Office to the Web

LOS ANGELES — In accession to the online-services apparatus of Windows 7, Microsoft appear affairs Tuesday to accommodate online versions of its added awful advantageous products: Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote that will run in a Web browser.

Janice Kapner, arch of communications for Microsoft's "information worker" group, which produces Microsoft Office products, said the aggregation absitively to bare its affairs — which accept been an advancing affair of belief — to be allotment of the broader billow accretion and online casework announcements that accept accent the company's Professional Developers Conference actuality this week.

"We're actuality administration at PDC so that humans admit that Office is allotment of the bigger action for the cloud," she said. "I apperceive humans accept been talking about this being for a continued time, but barter ... are absolutely now all-embracing it abundant added than just talking about it."

Google exhausted Microsoft to the bazaar for online abundance articles with its Google Docs and Spreadsheets offering, which Microsoft has absolved as too abbreviate on appearance to be a absolute adversary to its ascendant Office products. Office has about 500 actor users globally and was the capital disciplinarian of the Microsoft Business Division's $18.9 billion in budgetary 2008 acquirement (more than 31 percent of the company's total).

But Microsoft acutely sees the alcove Google has abounding and appears afraid to abalienate it to the Internet seek giant. Microsoft hopes the alms will aswell cut down on piracy of Office.

Microsoft is architecture "lightweight" versions of the four key pieces of its Office suite, which will be awash to businesses through aggregate licensing agreements and as hosted casework — paid as a cable — abundant like the Microsoft online casework the aggregation provides now for its server articles such as Exchange and Sharepoint.

The aggregation gave few data on its agenda for bringing online Office to market, added than a planned technology examination — bound to a baddest accumulation — by the end of the year.

Kapner did say that the online offerings are allotment of the next adaptation of Office, currently traveling by the name Office 14. Microsoft has been mum on the product's schedule.