Did you know that there are more than 250 Facebook applications that have more than one million monthly active users? Let me tell you why I'm excited about this fact.
As you likely saw, last week the beta of Docs for Facebook was announced at the f8 developer conference. Driven by Microsoft FUSE Labs, Docs is a great experiment on how the Office experience can come together in Facebook.
As you've heard me say before, Office 2010 is all about delivering the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser, and this exploration into social productivity maps perfectly to our strategy. This beta will allow us to learn about how we can extend Office usage and web productivity scenarios by enabling people to share their content with their friends and family in a contextually relevant way. This experiment underscores the big bets we're placing on delivering productivity in the cloud and on making Office experiences much more ubiquitous and relevant for the 500+ million customers we have and for the new customers we have yet to reach.
As far as online communities go, Facebook is certainly one of the most diverse and international. From artisans to digital natives to small businesses, people are creating and collaborating in new ways. Having Office experiences in the mix here, and seeing how such a diverse set of people use Office in the cloud or as a rich PC client will teach us a lot.
Just think about a student crafting a presentation for school. She can now create a group, capture feedback from her Facebook friends, use the rich photo editing features in PowerPoint 2010 to spice up her presentation, and share her finalized content in just a few clicks. And it's not all "work." Think about how aspiring chefs could use the Word Web App to create and share inventive recipes or how this Excel guru demonstrates his amazing creativity in Excel ☺.
I am sure it will also raise new questions like how people think about sharing documents on Facebook vs. other services they use today (like Windows Live, which is central to a lot of our work on Office Web Apps), and how we can help people keep track of all the sharing they do across different services and tools. We are in an exciting era where explorations like Docs and many others are needed to continue to push the envelope on the next generation of user scenarios and experiences. I am sure there will be some bumps along the way, but that's why our jobs in the dynamic tech industry remain so exciting.
As Steve Ballmer recently stated, "when it comes to the cloud, we're all in." The cloud truly offers new opportunities for Office in how we engage customers and reach new ones by rethinking our business and distribution models and developing new revenue streams.
In the end, this exploration in social productivity via Docs for Facebook truly underscores the long-term business strategy of Office 2010: deliver the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser.
I also want to share an update that we are getting close to delivering the Office Web Apps via Windows Live at scale and rolling them out around the world. They've been in technical preview since September, and the feedback we've received from that preview has been incredibly helpful in shaping our upcoming release and in reminding us how the web creates new and interesting opportunities for Office.
I hope you are as excited about where we are going as I am. Tell us what you think.
-- Takeshi Numoto, Corporate Vice President, Office
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