Microsoft has recently announced at Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) that it will be making it Microsoft Office 2010 available online. A lightweight verison of Word, Excel, PowerPoint ad OnNote will be released next year. This is part of Microsoft initiative to win back the web after it seemed to have lost the battle to big G a couple of times.

This announcement appears to come as tactical response to Google new Chrome OS, which is still in works. Microsoft flag ship product will compete against Google web apps which has been made available 3 years ago. Microsoft’s group product manager for Office told the BBC:

“…and what they tell us today is that going to the web often means they sacrifice fidelity, functionality and the quality of the content they care about. We knew that if and when we were ever going to bring applications into a web environment, we needed to do the hard work first because we hold such a high bar,”

Although the news was welcome by many who would like the power of working with Microsoft Office online, this didn’t go down well with Microssft partners. There was a lot of moan and questions on what Microsoft was trying to achieve, but Steve Ballmer hit back saying:

“If you wanted things that never change you probably shouldn’t be in the IT business. The one thing you can count on in our industry is that things change. And yet for every opportunity that looks like it gets smaller there’s at least three or four opportunities that look like they get bigger.”

“You [partners] have to sit here and say: ‘On anything where they are doing well, will they keep it up? On anything where they are not doing well, will they keep at it until they get it right or are they doing to go home?’ We don’t go home,” Ballmer shouted.