After Bing and its Scroogled campaign, Microsoft is now taking aim at Google Docs. Jake Zborowski, Microsoft’s senior product manager for Office, actually published two anti-Docs blog posts today: one hones in on document fidelity, the other – which includes a number of user testimonials – argues that Google Docs isn’t quite ready for primetime. → Read More
Microsoft today announced that it will fold about 100 sales people from Yammer into the Office 365 team. Microsoft also is making a point to focus on identity management and other issues as part of its road to full integration.
The news follows the road map that Microsoft set at its SharePoint Conference last November. In March, Microsoft detailed the transition and how Yammer will co-exist… → Read More
When it comes to productivity apps, Office is still clearly the market leader, and Microsoft is now also quickly iterating on its online apps for Office. When it comes to its competition with Google’s online productivity apps, though, it’s hard to figure out if Microsoft is feeling superior or threatened (or a bit of both). Earlier today, I talked to Michael Atalla, the director of product… → Read More
Microsoft wants to make Yammer the social layer across all of its products and today, at Convergence 2013, the company announced a more detailed roadmap for how it plans to do so. Earlier this year, it started by integrating Yammer and Dynamics CRM, but the company obviously has larger plans for the former TechCrunch50 winner it acquired for over $1 billion. This summer, Microsoft will roll out… → Read More
With Office 365 out of the door, Microsoft has now set its sights on getting more college students to give it a try. The company, which already makes a heavily discounted $80/4 years version of Office 365 University available to students, just announced a new offer that gives college students three months of free Office 365 access, plus another three months when they also share the offer on… → Read More
A month after launching its subscription-based Office 365 Home Premium for individuals, Microsoft today launched a major update to Office 365 for business users. Just like in its previous incarnation, Office 365 for Business will feature cloud-based online versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, as well as all of the standard Office web applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (and… → Read More
Over 22 million students currently use Microsoft’s Office 365 for Education online services, but today, the company is also announcing a new – and highly discounted – version of Office 365 for students whose schools don’t use Office 365. Office 365 University will cost just $79.99 for a four-year subscription and will give students access to all the standard Office products, including Word… → Read More
Microsoft announced that it planned to buy the popular peer-to-peer VoIP service Skype in early 2011 and the acquisition closed last October. Since then, though, Microsoft mostly left Skype alone and continued to run it as a stand-alone product. With the release of the next version of Office, though, Microsoft is now integrating Skype closely with its office suite. Skype will, for example, now… → Read More
Google scored an important win over Microsoft a few weeks ago when it won a $35 million U.S. government contract to bring its cloud-based office solution to the Department of the Interior. Microsoft’s legacy solutions, of course, remain a staple in government offices, but as more and more agencies want to move their productivity and collaboration services to the cloud, Microsoft is running the… → Read More
The first email hit TechCrunch’s tip line at 11:32 EDT. Others quickly followed saying the same thing: major Microsoft cloud services are down worldwide. Hotmail, Skydrive, and Microsoft’s recently launched Google Docs competitor, Office 365 were all unaccessable. Users took to twitter and our tip line to express their rage, but then approximately four hours after going offline, the services were… → Read More
At a press event in New York City, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer rolled out the general availability of Microsoft 365, an online suite of productivity apps which includes Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync. It is “where Microsoft Office meets the cloud,” he says. Microsoft first announced Office 365 last October, and has signed up 200,000… → Read More
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