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Above: Microsoft Excel, the web app

Did you think Microsoft forgot all that stuff they said about clouds and their products?  Nope.  After the flurry of activity surrounding Office 2010 this morning, here comes the web part.  According to Gizmodo, Microsoft will begin limited testing of the web apps today by invitation.  When the apps are available online, all you’ll need to get in is a Live ID as the apps like Word and Excel will be free.

Competition for web apps has heated up thanks to the likes of Google, Zoho and others.  These simple web apps offer dead-easy creation, editing, and sharing of documents that reside online, not on your machine.  You can access these docs from any machine and they require nothing but a free account to access (in most cases).  Microsoft is late to this party but the screen shots look like they are bringing the user experience from Word, Excel and others that we are all used to.  Competitors have had to recreate this experience and have had mixed results.

Desktop upgrades are fun, but is anything new really going to surprise you there?  Ooh look, a different ribbon icon!  What is big is how the desktop versions all aim to interact with the web versions.

The desktop counterparts look to add to the fun of web apps, not compete with them.  The desktop Word will have collaborative features alerting you that multiple copies of a doc are open and offer sync options.  Desktop Excel files can be shared via the browser; PowerPoint even adds in an on online conference tools so you can share your oh-so-awesome PointPoint with colleagues (even though they’ll pretend to be too busy). 

All in all, they look like good steps for the productivity suite that is Office.  It will be interesting to see how competitors respond to the coming MS invasion.

Watch a video of the new Outlook 2010 here:

Product page: [Microsoft Office 2010]