Microsoft to challenge Google with Office Suite

Bangalore: The clash of the Titans continue, as Microsoft announced that it will soon be launching Microsoft Office 2010 which will feature broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualization capabilities in Excel, and co-authoring in Word. Microsoft is testing a new version of its market-leading productivity suite for Windows PCs that will tie-up with new Web-based Office.
The applications offered by Microsoft will be similar to those offered by Google, a suite of lightweight online applications. Google's online spreadsheet and office related applications has been gaining popularity. To counter that Microsoft plans to take Office online, with a new series of free Office Web applications. "Office Web Applications, the online companion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online," says Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Website. The ad-supported web-suite will be available to more than 400 million Windows Live consumers at no extra cost.Google has been struggling to match the reputation of Microsoft office, as its own suite failed to perform up to their expectation. But Google is offering free version of this suite, thus attracting more than 15 million customers. Since then Microsoft has been under pressure to provide more free applications.Microsoft is also set to announce the launch of its internet-based operating system, called Azure. This will see it give tough competition to Google in the business of selling computing resources over the internet and by allowing developers to buy capacity to run their applications based on the amount of storage, bandwidth or any other resources that they use.Microsoft has also announced that it will reduce the number of office editions from eight to five. The Microsoft Office suite will be available in the first half of next year. So far, the company has made no announcement for an Office suite for Mac systems.

Is Bing really capable of stinging Google?

Bangalore: On June 3rd this year, Microsoft launched Bing, a renamed and reformed version of its search engine Kumo, with an intention to increase its hold on the search market, where an over 70 percent share is with Google. Though there are reports and testimonies in favor of this new search engine, Bing has to go a long way to catch up with Google in delivering in-depth results.

On the home page of Bing, there is a specific feature for search optimization where an Indian user can select between two options such as 'Show all' and 'Only from India'. If one checks any option before giving search words, the results returned will be optimized on the basis of the selection of the option. When a search on "Bikes' resale in Bangalore" was attempted by siliconindia news bureau on Bing with the 'show all category' marked, there was only one relevant link in the first ten results where one could find some bikes. But the same search on Google fetched all the ten results relevant and satisfying.

But in Bing's case, a user can try "Only from India" option, and get much more optimized results while searching about bike resale in Bangalore for instance. However, another problem with that is the user has to be aware where the stuff he is searching on is available, if he does not want to lose time switching the options. Since most of the popular websites are hosted outside India, searching for Facebook, for instance, in the 'India' section of Bing will turn nothing but a futile exercise.

Ironically enough, one will get better results about India not via India specific option, but through 'show all' section on Bing because Wikipedia is accessible via the latter option.

It was reported that Microsoft allocated $80 to $100 million dollars to build the brand name Bing. To put the amount in perspective, one must know that Google had spent only $25 million for its all ad campaigns in 2008. And naturally, Bing is fast catching up with its competitors in terms of market share as Alexa.com, a website that ranks websites across the world, listed Bing.com as the 15th most used website during the past one week. Just one week after its launch, Bing is already the second most popular search engine in the U.S. and worldwide except the U.K., according to StatCounter Global Stats.