Windows 7 - MS launches Office 365

In another step onto Google's turf, Microsoft launched Office 365, a Web-based version of Office and e-mail rolled into a monthly service for less than the cost of a Netflix subscription.
The new Office 365 is the answer to Google Apps, a Web version of word processing and spreadsheets that Google offers to businesses for $50 per year. Microsoft's new basic service will cost $72 a year. Microsoft said people can start signing up for a free test version, and the service will start selling next year.
"Customers will get the best of everything we know about productivity 365 days a year," said Kurt DelBene, the new president of Microsoft's Business division, at a Tuesday news conference in San Francisco.
It's one of the many ways Microsoft is pushing into cloud computing: selling software served from and stored in the company's giant data centers.
"We believe it's one of the most impactful transformations that will happen in our generation," DelBene said of the cloud.
For businesses with fewer than 25 employees, Microsoft is offering the $6 monthly service that combines Office Web Apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint — with SharePoint for collaboration, Exchange for e-mail and Lync for communications.

New York City has upgraded to Office 365, Microsoft's new cloud-based version of Office.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer announced the agreement in a news conference in New York on Wednesday. The five-year contract is worth $20 million per year, saving the city $10 million annually.
"We had more than two dozen separate license agreements and many different individual maintenance and support packages," Bloomberg said at the news conference. "It was complicated, cumbersome and, needless to say, not very cost effective."
The new agreement covers 100,000 city workers, and it includes Office 365, as well as Azure for city developers to build applications on Microsoft's cloud computing platform. New York will continue to run software and keep data on city servers, but some software and data will move to Microsoft's data centers.