Given that this version of Office is going to bring Microsoft's Web apps

Girouard: All Web apps aren't created equal. Microsoft Office 2010 is building products that are designed complements and require the desktop applications. We're building products that have no dependency on desktop applications.

I think they have a strategy designed around their business model, which means they require Office and people to license Office. There are a lot of caveats and limitations in their Web Office stuff. It requires SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 is not part of BPOS (the current version of Microsoft's hosted online service.) The only way you actually get Web-based apps now is through the installed product, the on-premise product. I think they have a lot of complexity to their model, a lot of dependencies. You can't have SharePoint 2010 without 64-bit servers, etc. When you keep pulling at the thread what you have is the usual ugly complexity of upgrading enterprise software.

Frankly, because very, very few people were using it. An industry standard approach used by a lot of software companies and browsers is better. We wanted to get to HTML 5 faster and trying to drag along a Gears-based implementation was going to slow that down.

The Web as it was originally designed was not designed to work offline. As a result, a lot of things grew up on the Web don't. Sharepoint sites, for that matter, don't work offline. Blogs don't work offline. The Web is going to adapt to support Download Office 2010  access and that's what HTML 5 is about. That's our view. We don't necessarily want to handle our Google Docs as special case. We want to have Web-based applications work offline properly. We think everybody's Web-based applications ought to work offline.