SalientPoint

BusinessInsider.com is reporting that Microsoft is to offer its basic cloud version of MS office for free. The rationale behind this gambit would be to counter Google Docs – a goal important enough to risk cannibalizing Microsoft’s most profitable business. Will this persuade the users who have already defected to Google Docs, Open Office et.al. to return to MS Office? MS might be up against other forces than mere price and product quality in this battle. Many users have for a long time felt trapped in a Microsoft monopoly which poses a significant emotional hurdle for the users MS wants to lure back. Many users will be unwilling to give up their new-found freedom, even for a potentially superior product offered free of charge.

Yesterday we installed Postbox public beta. It blows the bundled Mail app out of the water with stellar performance, convention-over-configuration support for major mail sources, including Google, Yahoo, and… Facebook, tabs, built-in indexed views mail by Images and Contacts, Attachments and Links.

We really like this app, and would strongly recommend you try it.

We use Google Apps for the company mail, calendaring, document management, etc, and those of us with iPhones have been using the Nuevasync service to make it all sync over the air.

When Google finally announced “native” support for over-the-air synchronization of calendars, we just had to try it. Unlike Nuevasync, the Google solutions does not appear to support syncing multiple calendars. This is surprising given that Google touts the calendar sharing as one of the main benefits of their calendar solution.

Both Nueavasync and Google Mobile Sync masquerade as Exchange servers, and since the iPhone only supports one Exchange account, this became a showstopper for the Google solution.