Microsoft Office boss on Facebook and the cloud

Heading up Microsoft's Office division is Kurt DelBene, who took up the reins just last month. His group launched Lync last Wednesday, the successor to Microsoft Office Communicator, which mixes instant messaging, audio and video chat, and a VoIP service. It effectively completes the puzzle of apps that make up the Office suite. Lync, which goes on sale soon, is beginning as a server product companies will be able to deploy on their own hardware, before moving to a hosted cloud service as part of Microsoft's Office365 suite early next year.

Step further

And then you can take that a step further and think about clients that are on the mobile phone themselves, where you're in the presence of various of the people on our buddy list, or anybody from the organization would be present on your phone and you can actually connect to them from the phone originally, as well. And so you can think about starting from the mobile phone and starting from somebody's presence and making a phone call to them directly from the phone. So, in the announcement, I think Gurdeep mentioned connectivity to Windows Phone 7 in 2011, and for the iPhone, as well. So, that would be for actually having a client on the phone.

I think the second thing is the variety in terms of devices and solutions for the PC as well. And so there are people who are going to embrace Lync by having a PC experience, and there are people who are going to embrace it with a more traditional IP/PBX or IP phone, and we think there should be great solutions across both of those.

The whole vision around PC

And then I think the whole vision around PC, phone, and browser has been a big piece. So, having an experience in the browser with the Office Web Applications, so that if I'm away from my desk, or I have somebody who just wants to go view a document or do some light editing, you can do that in a way that is collaborative, or is complementary, rather, with how you use the full desktop client.

And similarly, delivering the rich experience in phones, you know, we did an Office hub in Windows Phone 7, but are also working with partners like Nokia to have a rich experience on mobile devices, as well. So, I think those are kind of the areas of investment that have resonated with people. I think bringing the new user interface with the ribbon to all of the applications, I think the completion of that has been a key element.