Microsoft Corp launched new Office software for home users, featuring constantly updated, online access to documents from all kinds of devices as the world’s largest software company attempts to tailor its most profitable product to a mobile generation.
The new Office suite of applications – including desktopstaples Outlook e-mail, Excel, Word and PowerPoint – is aimed at home users rather than businesses, and is designed to extend Microsoft’s domination of the workplace to the home office and beat back growing competition from Google Inc’s free online apps.
“The notion of an always up-to-date streaming version of Office comes directly from how people are using devices today,” said Kurt DelBene, head of Microsoft’s Office unit, in a phone interview. “You really want all your content to roam with you. We see that as an opportunity to deliver what customers are asking for.”
The version of the new software launched on Tuesday, called Office 365 Home Premium, is the first major overhaul of Office since 2010. Big companies, which generally buy Microsoft’s software under multi-year contracts, already got the latest features of the new Office in December.
After downloading the basic programs online, users can access the latest versions of all Office applications from up to five devices on a subscription basis for $100 a year.
The software will be updated online, marking a change from the past where users had to wait years for upgrades to installed software.
It is the latest step in what chief executive Steve Ballmer called Microsoft’s “transformation to a devices and services business,” making the company more like Apple.
The new Office largely adopts the look of last year’s Windows 8, with a cleaner, more modern-looking design and includes touch-screen capability.
The ‘ribbons’ showing commands in Word and Excel are mostly unchanged. For the first time the package includes online calling and video service Skype, which Microsoft bought in 2011.
Users’ work can be stored on their devices but also in remote data centres – known as the cloud – and the latest version of a document can accessed from any licensed device with a browser.
Two-and-a-half years in the making, the new Office is designed to extend Microsoft’s domination of the business market and counter the growing popularity of Google Apps, a collection of online-only, Office-style applications Google provides free for home users and sells to businesses for $50 per user per year.
Microsoft is hoping its move into online services, alongside its new Surface tablets, will push it into the forefront of mobile computing, which has been led by Google’s Android software and Apple’s combination of slick hardware and apps.