Staff Techdrunk 
Software giant Microsoft is now planning to make most of its office software line Word and Excel available online.
The web hosted applications called Software-as-a-Service are made to allow users to get benefited by getting the programs at lower initial prices. These applications are hosted online and there is no need to download them to computers.
Stephen Elop, President Mircosoft Business Division told that what their company is thinking will be possible in five years. After that around 50 percent of the use of exchange and sharepoint will be available online. He also said: “In a year or two, if the economic conditions will remain tough, than Microsoft expects quite a lot movement in this direction because there will be lot of people taking advantage of these programs”.
The online offering of Microsoft are expected to be directly competing with Google’s web-services like Google, Docs, Calender, Gmail and instant messaging.
Although Microsoft has still not revealed, which services will be offered online but it has only given a hint that list will be rolled out as early as 2009.
