While attempting to fall in line with the general tendency of traditional desktop applications moving to the Internet, Microsoft is migrating bits and pieces of its Office System online, and planning a stronger connection between Office 14 and Office Live, in the future. At the same time, the Redmond company has to only satisfy the end users' hunger for Software as a Service with just crumbs of Office, as to not impact its desktop product. And as far-fetched as it might sound, a web-based version of Office is in the works on the heels of Google Docs. But at the same time, stretching Office 14 into the cloud will not signal the divorce of Office 14 from the desktop. As a matter of fact, the Office line of products, as well as future versions of the Windows platform, despite featuring more intimate connections with their cloud counterparts, will still remain anchored on the desktop in accordance with the company's Software plus Service business strategy.

At the same time, Office evolves and, at the Office System Developers Conference 2008, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stressed the increasing relevance of SharePoint becoming just as critical a standard as the productivity suite. SharePoint, in Gates' perspective, is aimed at being placed straight at the center of the next generation of collaborative efforts.

"So it takes what was a very fragmented world of portals, and special search, document management, and workflow, and things that were expensive, and complicated on their own, and each has their own extensibility model, and were only used by a subset of the employee population, and instead takes it and says, no, this is something that just like Office on the client, the broad employee base should use. So when you're starting a project, or a product, or an analysis, building a SharePoint Web site to find one of those templates, that's just a common sense thing to do. So that centerpiece over the last five years, the server piece, has been strengthened incredibly with the success of SharePoint and Exchange. In fact, that piece has become a huge target for software development," Gates stated.

The Microsoft Chairman even went a bit further with what was instore for Office 14. In this context, Gates specifically referenced Access 14, the next version of the product designed to replace Microsoft Office Access 2007. At this point in time, Access is a rich client interface designed to enable the auditing of shared information on Windows SharePoint Services. But what if Access 14 will evolve beyond the desktop and into the cloud?

"Access, of course, has been phenomenally successful, but you think of it as just client forms and client data. Now with Access 2007, they did a great job where you could replicate from SharePoint down to Access lists back and forth, but that still didn't let you run your logic up on the server. So the next step is to take that base of Access users and literally let them write things that connect directly up to SharePoint and so it's server-based. So it's a logical step for Access. There's a lot of smart people working on that, so in no sense are we leaving the Access people behind. The same way we moved Excel up to the server, now we're moving Access up there as well," Gates added.