For the early adopter crowd: Microsoft has released browser-based trial versions of Office 2007 (including Word, Powerpoint, Access, Excel, etc). Unfortunately, the demos won’t allow you to save documents to a local hard drive, but they’re still interesting if you’re looking to see what functional and GUI changes/improvements are in store (Jensen Harris, lead program manager for Office’s “user experience” team, maintains a fairly active blog with more background info).
My take is that this is a smart move for Microsoft as they get free feedback. Of course, one could ask how relevant Office will be going forward as free web-based alternatives continue to improve, but that’s another topic…
Here’s the next version of Office: http://zoho.com/
Left by Zoli Erdos on August 11th, 2006