Microsoft still not ready to shift Word online

Angus Kidman
Friday, 05 January 2007 01:03

Your IT - Home IT

Despite the growing threat from online rivals, Microsoft still isn't ready to shift Word and its other Office applications away from their traditional PC-based roots.

A recently posted Q&A with soon-to-retire corporate vice president, Peter Pathe, who has been responsible for Word for the past 14 years, is more notable for what it omits than what it says.

While Pathe outlines many of the milestones in Word's history, and spruiks the much-discussed Ribbon interface which makes its debut in the soon-to-hit-retail Office 2007, he's conspicuously silent on the topic of whether Microsoft will ever offer Word (or its other Office siblings) as purely Internet applications.

The closest he comes to acknowledging the issue is in a discussion of desktop Word's Internet integration. "We've spent a lot of time over the past decade working on making Word a great platform for Web-based and collaborative processes," he said, adding: "The program supports HTML and HTTP, XML templates, and other Web-based protocols."

With 450 million users of Office globally, Microsoft arguably doesn't need to worry about the emergence of rivals such as Google's Writely just yet. If it fails to offer a credible alternative, however, it risks eventually losing that market share, just as its rivals WordPerfect and Ami Pro collapsed under the onslaught of Microsoft's suite offerings in the 1990s.

Microsoft does offer an Office Live product, but it contains none of the core Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook), concentrating instead on business functions such as building and promoting Web sites.