the corner office

From my little corner, Microsoft's online version of MS Office is just fluff. I don't see the success of (say) Gmail translating to Google Docs, which looks nice enough but (in my own experience) can't help but be sluggish and unweildy in comparison to a desktop app.

So this is just defensive marketing, an 'us-too' to appease CTOs who don't really know what they or their users want but would like to sound hip by getting onto the 'cloud' bandwagon.

Is there a use case? I'm sure there is. But Microsoft has no hope of dislodging Google to the extent that the world moves online, and Google Docs won't kill MS Office to the extent that big and bulky spreadsheets and word applications will work best as local apps.

It will be interesting to revisit this post in 5 years' time and see how far off the mark I was.