14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Microsoft made its Office 2013 suite officially available for download worldwide, and also announced the availability of Office 365 Home Premium in 162 markets globally, with 20GB of SkyDrive storage attached.
The deal should prove beneficial both for the Office Suite, which already has over 1 billion users, as well as for the cloud storage service, which faces competition from services such as Dropbox and others.
However, it appears that the company is not worried about these rivals, at least this what the company’s CEO Steve Ballmer said in a recent interview with Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek.
Office 365 is touted as Office in the Cloud, and Ballmer appears convinced that this is one bet that Microsoft will win.
When pointed to the fact that Microsoft was coming late to the cloud market, and that it would indeed face competition from Dropbox, Microsoft’s CEO suggested that this was, in fact, a small rival to worry about.
“Well, you’ve got to remember, 100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually. We’ve got a lot more Office users,” Ballmer reportedly said.
“And actually if you even want to go to the cloud, we have a lot of Hotmail and SkyDrive users. I’m not beating on Dropbox. They’re a fine little startup and that’s great.”
He also explained that bounding Office and SkyDrive together was an expected move from Microsoft, since it was the only way in which it could evolve the HTML version of Office that was launched several years back.
Although it stands above rivals at 1 billion users, Microsoft’s Office Suite is seeing increased competition from Google Apps and other offerings, just as SkyDrive has its own share of rivalry.
However, Microsoft’s CEO is confident that the company did very well with the launch of the new Office, claiming in a blog post yesterday that this was yet another bold step the software giant took in its evolution.