Monday, July 13, 2009

Microsoft Plans Free Version of Office, or how I learned to stop caring about my desktop.

Link: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/hosted/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218500034

Not surprising, given Google's announcement of the Chrome OS, Microsoft is finally seeing the light and creating free web applications of all their shiny products.

It's amazing what a little competition will do for technology, now that Microsoft has a little fear we might see some actual progress.

How do I think this will effect online learning? probably in some small (but positive) ways first. For one thing, online instructors can now put assignments requiring a word processor or spreadsheet without worrying that their students won't have access to one. Another impact is that collaboration will become much easier, no more emailing around word docs, just log in to the account and open the shared resource. Finally classroom learning may start to use more real time work with the instructor and students working of the same file at the same time.

Can you think of any immediate impact these web applications offer to elearning?

2 comments:

  1. Do you think this will put some fire under the seats of the Google Docs dev team as well? Would be nice to see that suite get a little better.

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  2. Here is a great article discussing the problems google is having converting the 'office' demographic:

    http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/168248/outlook_separation_anxiety_holds_back_google_apps.html

    Certainly having these two go back and forth reinventing the conventianal word processor is going to be fantastic.

    If I were to guess what the future brings it would be word docs that are just as interactive as a web page, with video, audio, and other media.

    Now if only we can get printers to print youtube videos....meh...im sure Kindle or the iPhone can handle that proble....

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