Facebook Office

Imagine arriving at “work” which these days means: glancing at your phone, or sitting down with your Latte at starbucks, etc …and proceeding to work on spreadsheets, dealing with email and tweaking that presentation you have been working on. Also collaborating with colleagues online, bit of social planning  and then you get a pop up that one of your prospective clients is in the line at the same coffee shop. You look up, see them and invite them over for an impromptu presentation you were going to be giving them later in the week.

Oh, and you were doing that all within facebook.

OK so here is my predication, full integration of Microsoft’s Office programs in Apps form within the year. You’ll be working within facebook using the Microsoft Office Cloud.

As google ups the anti this week with their decision to not allow your gmail contacts to be automatically fed into Facebook (because Facebook won’t allow you to download your full contact database in transferable format) the lines of battle are being drawn up with more detail every day.

A further sign of this could be seen when Facebook decided that Bing (microsoft) would be the search partner within the facebook’s city walls. (When bing launched someone wrote critically that the letters stood for But It’s Not Google, however I think facebook’s decision to partner with them could more accurately be described as Because It’s Not Google. )

As great as google Apps for business are, they are not part of Facebook, and it’s increasingly unlikely that they will be. Facebook and Microsoft on the other hand seem to be getting closer and closer by the day.

What do you think? Would you use Word, Publisher, Excel & Powerpoint if they were online & free at facebook, (in return for being bombarded with ads). We are leaving comments open for this.

Hey you get off of my cloud (computing)

Microsoft is announcing that they too are going to be launching an online version of their Office product. This is being seen as a direct target of google’s cloud “Documents” product, which though only registering about 5% of the market, is growing.

The new product from Microsoft will be available through their Windows Live portal, that’s hotmail for those who still use it.

The word is that with google soon be lauching their operating system, Chrome OS, in direct competition to Microsoft’s strangle hold of Windows, Microsoft are going after google’s “Document” products!

On the face of it I wouldn’t be too worried if I was google…

However, the major coup is that they are going to be partnering with Facebook to offer this as an app there.

On second thoughts, google should worry!