Microsoft revamps Office, looks to the cloud

At a special event on Monday, Microsoft announced the next version of Microsoft Office. built for the cloud and for touch-based computing and packed with features that make it more social and, Microsoft hopes, more intuitive to use compared to previous releases.

"The Office that we'll talk about and show you today is the first round of Office that's designed from the get -go to be a service," Ballmer said at a news conference. "This is the most ambitious release of Microsoft Office that we've ever done."

In the latest Office suite, Microsoft is introducing a subscription-based cloud service (and thus an entirely new business model). Users will still be able to purchase the new Office 2013 in the same way they would with previous versions — by paying a one-time fee for the right to use Office forever on a single PC. But now there's also a revamped Office 365 that users can pay for monthly.

"Your modern Office thinks cloud first. That's what it means to have Office as a service," Ballmer said, adding that a preview version of the software is now available online at www.office.com/preview.

Microsoft has also embedded some communications functions into Word. For example, if users are collaborating on a document and one of them edits a sentence, another user can tap the sentence and a box pops up showing who made the edits. The box includes presence information for that person, and if they're online at that moment, the user can send them an instant message from within Word.

Read the full Reuters story -here-

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