Streaming Office: Death knell for Google Apps?

It’s the holy grail of punditry: You make a bold, unconventional prediction that’s way out in front of an emerging trend, then get to gloat as that prediction comes true. In my case, the prediction involved Microsoft’s recently (at the time) acquired SoftGrid technology. I saw the acquisition as a clear sign that Microsoft was gearing up to deliver a subscriptions-based, hosted licensing model for Microsoft Office.

Of course, not everyone agreed with me. In fact, the CTO of a key Microsoft competitor all but dismissed the possibility on technical grounds. SoftGrid, he said, was an “inside the firewall” technology, and Microsoft would be hard pressed to make it work over the web.

Fast forward to today and we now hear that Microsoft intends to do exactly what the “nay-sayers” said they wouldn’t: Use its newly re-branded Microsoft Application Virtualization (MAV) technology to deliver Office and other traditional “fat client” applications as subscriptions-based services, with the Internet/web (along with some of those massive data centers the company has been building) providing the distribution infrastructure.

Now it’s time for another bold prediction: Streaming Office will clobber Google Apps, eventually driving the search giant out of the hosted applications business altogether.

Consider the following advantages to a Streaming Office suite:

• Full Office Functionality – MAV encapsulates the entire sequenced application. This isn’t some “web-based” Office knock-off. It’s the real deal: Microsoft Office in all it’s sophisticated, class-leading, standard setting (flaunting?), enterprise desktop-dominating glory.

• True Offline Operation – Though Streaming Office may initially come to you over the wire, the actual application bits get cached locally by the MAV agent. This is the same MAV agent that hosts the virtualized application runtime, so offline operation is entirely seamless. As any veteran SoftGrid user can attest, it’s as good as – if not better than – having Office installed locally.

• It’s the Future of Windows Application Deployment – Everyone knows that Microsoft needs to “fix” the Windows runtime environment. All of that legacy application baggage is starting to drag down the client, making each new Windows version “fatter” and more kludge-like. I believe that MAV is one solution Microsoft may be mulling over as a means to preserve backwards compatibility while they tighten the native runtime so that only well-behaved code (including the MAV runtime) can execute.

  With this kind of R&D investment you can be sure that Streaming Office – which is a byproduct of MAV’s continued evolution – will be a high quality product and receive tremendous, cross-divisional support (just like Office does today).

Faced with a decision between a watered-down, limited, web-dependent pseudo-suite and the full power and richness of Microsoft Office, users will flock to the Microsoft camp – especially if the company prices a “pay as you go” Office aggressively. And then it will be “game over” for Google Apps and its ilk.

Just remember: You read it here first!