"It's called Pro Plus, and it's not something you own. You pay a subscription fee."

You don't 'own' Office 2010 either, even though you may pay for the licence in one 'hit'...

WOW WEEEEE!

Thanks god I just have Office 97.

That bloatware office products really stink to high heaven.

I really would have thought MS would be smart and do to office what they did to XP and let

users SKIN Office to look and act like older versions even though the core engines is the latest and greatest. BUT NOOOOOOO gotta put up with this ribbon crap.

Plus ca change

Funny how history repeats itself. Once upon a time enterprises had to rent compute time from IBM, who ran a nice little cloud operation on their mainframes. You wanted office apps? Sure, say hello to PROFS. Then some startups came along and said, this is nuts, let people run what they want without the high priests and priestesses getting involved. And we had an explosion in creativity. There are whole ecosystems built around what you can do with Excel and VBA.

Now Microsoft is turning back to the cloud. I seriously doubt that people are going to junk their investment in Office-on-PC and return to the old days.

I still use Office 2000 and I've no need to upgrade. Why you ask?

O2K's wonky in a few places but with sp3 it's reasonably reliable and stable.

Why would I bother changing as nothing much has changed in 12 years that I would use? Moreover, there's been no change to the grammar checker, little to the speller and negligible changes to page formatting, headers and footers etc., which is where I'd like to see improvements.

I will continue to use O2K with the Sun's ODF plugin v 3.2 for MS Office until LibreOffice comes of age (which I also have on my machine but only occasionally use as the 12-year old O2K is still significantly better than L.O. in many regards).

When Microsoft finally gives me what I really need instead of what it thinks I might need, then I might consider upgrading.

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An afterthought:

Seems to me that M$ would do much better if it provided a truly useful and functional feature such as a proper virtual 3D filing system that's fully integrated within MSO itself.

M$ failed to deliver the database filing system, WinFS, with both Vista and Windows 7 (and there's still no hint of it in Win 8 either). Integrating it, or part of it, into Office on a limited scale would make sense as it'd mean that years worth of files could be properly named, dated, indexed and cross-referenced by subject etc.

Moreover, a cleverly designed system would also mean that this additional metadata, which would be normally be lost when exported to a flat folder/directory-based file system such as XP/Win7 or Linux, could be integrated into both the file as additional metadata as well as into a section of the file name by some smart shorthand naming protocol.

For me, this would be the killer new feature.

Problem solved?

What exactly are they trying to solve here?

I work for many large corporations in IT, some with 10,000+ employees. None of those companies would consider using an online office suite. Hell, they generally blocks docs.google and any other site that could potentially be used to get data on or off site.

It sounds more like a solution for personal/SOHO users, but they're currently disallowed. Plus, I'm increasingly hearing of such people switching to Open/Libre Office because it does the basics well enough without costing anything.

IMHO, MS Office peaked with 97/2003.

ProPlus

you can buy pro plus as a one of payment?

You buy it as a open license, no media just a one of payment and you own the key?

microsoft SKU 79P-03549

what your thinking of is the new office professional rental package (SKU 79P-02695)

but in all honesty the ribbon was pants, 2010 is remarkably hard to integrate into existing systems and exchange 2010 was a mistake.

Meh

No macros in the web version, no use to our 7000 users then

Microsoft's successor of Windows and Office as we know it

Microsoft has a patented pay-as-you-go system which is currently used not only for Office 365, but also for the Windows Azure platform - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

There are many sound companies such as NASA, Xerox, T-mobile, Volvo, using Windows Azure and paying for used resources instead of purchasing their own servers. This scheme may indeed prove beneficial for businesses in cases you need the service available 365 days a year, but you will use it infrequently per demand. The idea behind Windows Azure may lead to a new version of Windows, the successor of 7/8, which is just a thin client connecting to the cloud. Users will no longer have their copy of the whole system. This is going to eliminate unauthorized copying because users will never download the software, but rather just control it. The used technology is Citrix. Microsoft and Citrix already have an alliance http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/partners/citrix.aspx and work together on it.

Once it's all the cloud, you can't even access your own data without paying for it, and frankly who likes having his own CPU capped unless subscribing to some expensive enterprise plan? How easy is it to be the man in the middle in case of a cloud?

What value of 'not supported'?

For firefox 3 or later on linux do they mean it'll probably work but they won't help you, or that it's deliberately broken?

Ahh. So it's in the cloud but you still need your own reservoir?

Sort of like the old .dsp pages for the web. I predict the same demise.

successor of MScrap office? or.....

another streamlined method to fleece your sorry pockets? go figure....

successor of MScrap office? or.....

OR another pimped, full of s...t product if it can be branded as such....

MS - they don't get it

In the technology frenzy of today, your leading product will be eaten up before long. Your only decision is whether you will do it with a superior product (possibly disruptive, and lower financial returns) or some competitor will do it (probably disruptive, probably lower financial returns).

This is Microsoft's dilemma. So far it appears that they're hedging their bets on the old scheme. Bad news guys - that won't work. I've lived through a couple of these and in every case they failed. Of course, the PHBs responsible had gone with their bonuses by the time of the implosion (not all that long, actually).

Another Alternative

We use OpenOffice (aka LibreOffice) quite happily. Another alternative not mentioned above is Symphony from IBM. It's writen in Java and runs well on all the versions of Window we have. Haven't tried it on Linux.