Two major announcements came out in the last two days that may very well revolutionize the way people use the Web.
MS Office 2010
Microsoft released the first public beta version of Microsoft Office 2010. You can download the beta by visiting the MS Office 2010 Web site (Silverlight 2.0 is required to view the page) and registering as a beta tester. You will then be provided a temporary license key along with links to download the 32-bit version and/or the 64-bit version of the new office suite. I am currently downloading the beta, but have obviously not had a chance to test it, yet, since it’s still downloading.
As you may or may not have heard, MS Office 2010 will integrate online usage, allowing users to store and manipulate Office files on a cloud server, giving MS Office users less reason to use Google Apps.
During the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 09, a lot of other announcements were made regarding Microsoft’s future in the online world. You can find some good summaries and wrap-ups at Beta News and TheNextWeb.
Chrome OS
There has been a lot of speculation lately saying that the first beta releases of Google’s new “operating system” would be coming before the end of this month. There have even been multiple fraudulent versions of the OS released (and subsequently shut down). Today, however, Google officially spoke out about Chrome OS.
Rather than seeing a beta release today, we were told that it would still be another year before we would get to use the new OS, but we were shown screen shots and provided with an animated video explaining how Chrome OS will work.