It’s been week of a big announcements for Microsoft who yesterday kicked-off their Professional Developer’s Conference and announced that the next release of Microsoft Office will finally include an online version you can use via a browser. According to ReadWriteWeb Microsoft say it will be a “lightweight version” but that it will “still have rich functionality and be comparable to Google’s suite of online office applications.” Quite ironic that Microsoft are looking to emulate Google’s own emulation of their office suite in the form of Google Docs – perhaps this is another example of how far off the pace Microsoft are nowadays. In a survey however, ReadWriteWeb found that almost half of all respondents still use Microsoft Word as their main word processing app so Microsoft could still gain lost ground IF the online version proves as good as the offline one.
In the same breath, Microsoft also unveiled an early developer preview of Windows 7. As both myself and Elena have already found, it looks very much like Windows Vista so no big surprises there. According to Download Squad, the new OS features a revised taskbar which allows you to perform actions directly by clicking on applications a la Dock in Mac OS (they surely wouldn’t copy Mac OS again would they?). You can also apparently maximize a window by just dragging it to the top of the screen.
One big plus is that according to their report, it does seem to use less RAM than memory-guzzling Vista. You can find some preview screenshots taken from the Microsoft Conference in this Flickr gallery.
