Web Worker Daily

The much-anticipated online version of Microsoft Office will roll out into Technical Preview later this summer. While Microsoft has announced that it will be free to everyone with a Windows Live account (and thus free to anyone), it looks like the free version will not have the full feature set. In a detailed post over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Tom Reestman explains that this is a case of Microsoft tripping over itself by wanting the best of both worlds — to offer a free, web-based solution for consumers that leverages the Office brand to compete with Google Apps and Zoho, while at the same time telling businesses that it’s really just a supplement to the “real” Office on the desktop, and that it will require licensing and server costs in order to get the full package.

Microsoft has a great brand in Office, a huge user base and an opportunity to come up with an online product that blows its online competitors out of the water — unfortunately, as it’s still heavily reliant on revenues from the desktop version of the suite, it looks like the web app will be compromised, which is good news for both Google and Zoho.

Are you looking forward to Office Web?

Microsoft said today that the Technical Preview of Office 2010 will start to be be rolled out to beta testers, and confirmed speculation from last week that Office 2010 will include Office Web, lightweight web app versions of Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. Office Web will be available for free to anyone with a Microsoft Live account.

This is especially good news for web workers who have been longing for an access-anywhere version of the Office suite, many of whom have been struggling with hybrid Office/Google Docs solutions.

However, the bad news is that Office 2010 and Office Web won’t be available until the first half of next year, so unless you have access to the Technical Preview you’re going to have to wait a long time to try it out. Microsoft has hinted that a wider beta test of Office Web could be made available later this year, but that still seems like a painfully long wait in today’s “release early, iterate often” world of web apps. In the meantime, I think it’s quite likely that we’ll see some considerable improvements to Google Apps.

What do you think of this announcement? Can you wait until early next year for Office Web?