And although Google apps are great and popular, most everyone I know is still using Microsoft Office applications.
With touch-screen functionality on a fully capable machine with a proper amount of on-board storage that will be able to smoothly run Microsoft Office applications out of the box, Windows 8 promises to be an exciting transition for dedicated PC users, while offering the best of both worlds for tablet users.
Raikes built the business by tying new products such as Microsoft SharePoint to hits, such as Microsoft's Office suite of productivity applications, says Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft.
Gates also revealed the addition of new applications to Microsoft Office, the company's dominant productivity software suite.
They let you make phone calls, send e-mails, browse the Web, take pictures and video, play music and even use applications such as Microsoft Office.
We use Windows Terminal Server as a thin client to operate our three main software applications: Microsoft Office, QuickBooks and GoldMine, a customer relationship management program.
Nokia has licensed some of Microsoft's Windows applications, such as Office, on its smartphones, for example.
Google has shown no interest in leasing out its vast infrastructure, but it is challenging Microsoft with a suite of online applications akin to Office.
We also moved our critical applications (office productivity) away from Microsoft to OpenOffice, the free software developed by Sun and thankfully still supported by Oracle.
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Susan Grabau, Sun's StarOffice product line manager, said that these high-profile partnerships should extend the company's reach so it can better compete with bitter rival Microsoft, whose Office product is the most widely used desktop applications suite.
The attorneys-general have complained about the means by which Microsoft has managed to dominate the lucrative market for office suites (applications that combine word processors, spreadsheets and presentation tools).
While Google can launch online spreadsheet and word processing applications, Microsoft can't respond without damaging its powerful Office software business.
Gates and an assistant then demonstrated some new features of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2000, which will have a "self repairing" capability for applications.
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Microsoft generates plenty of cash thanks to its dominance of PC operating systems and office applications.
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Microsoft leveraged its monopolistic power in operating systems (Windows) into success in applications (Office).
On the one hand, he noted that Microsoft has a long history of providing cross-platform applications. (You can run Office on the Mac, for instance.) And he also noted that you can run the limited function Web-based version of Office in a browser on basically any device at all, including iPads and iPhones, to read documents and do some light editing.
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In 2012, Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and Office will give way to more real-time, social communication cloud applications, which run on mobile devices and browsers.
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They let you make phone calls, send e-mails, browse the Web, take pictures and video, play music and even use applications such as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Office.
Throughout Office's history, it's been the most important set of Windows applications for Microsoft.
Tweaking Microsoft, Schmidt has moved to snap up online companies that can offer desktop-style applications for free, posing at least a token threat to Microsoft's money-spewing Office suite.
Although Microsoft has no immediate plans to offer its Office programs over the web, it has already staked claims in the applications-services business.
Microsoft says that Office Home and Student 2013 RT, which contains new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, will be included on ARM-based Windows 8 devices, including Microsoft Surface.
The company wants your computers to be running Windows, your users to be working in Office, your data to be stored in their version of SQL and your applications to be written by Microsoft certified developers.
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