Finally, we have a hint of what could Microsoft do in order to gain back its lead on the Cloud, which had been partly lost to Google in the recent years. This news is also interesting to understand what Free Cloud might face in terms of future (or already existing) competition.

Microsoft announced in France that it has gained 600 new clients for its Cloud based online Office suite and even boasts its sucess against Google in several large companies. Clearly, Office, the dominant productivity suite, is now used by Microsoft to take a lead on the Cloud. With nothing, or close to nothing, on the Free Software camp, or on the Free Cloud camp, to compete with MS Office, Microsoft can now use its lead to takeover the whole Cloud market. That's impressive, and frightning.

Web based OpenOffice has been said to be in the plans or Oracle... just like MySQL extend support is the plans or Oracle. But can we trust Oracle for providing long term Freedom? Of course, we have Palo Suite SaaS, the only software which can possibly beat Excel nowadays. You can try a Demo here. But no true SaaS version yet... It is clearly time for the Free Cloud movement to come up with some real competition, ready to use, cheaper the Free and freer than gratis.

Jean-Paul Smets

(c) Free Cloud Alliance - TIO New - 2010