Office 365 is officially available in 40 countries

Today Steve Ballmer at the press-event in New York officially announced the launch of the cloud solution Office 365. And it's nice that it becomes available globally. Office 365 is offered in 21 languages (English, Br Portuguese, Chinese (simplified, traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, and Russian) and 40 countries (US, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, and the UK).

Recall that Office 365 includes online versions of Office applications - Office Web Apps (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), as well as online versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync.

And of course, talking about Office 365, we can't help mentioning about its main competitor - Google Apps. The day before the Office 365 release Shan Sinha, a former director of strategy for Microsoft SharePoint, and now Google Apps Product Manager, posted in Google's official enterprise blog the article called "365 reasons to consider Google Apps". In fact, there are fewer reasons and these are the general ones:

Collaboration. Shang says that Google Apps are created for teams and Office 365 - for personal productivity. He means the superiority of Google Docs over the Office Web Apps in real-time collaborative editing.

Cross-platform. Shang says that Google Apps work anywhere, while Office 365 actually works only on Windows / Internet Explorer. By the way, it's confirmed by Galen Gruman from Infoword, who personally tested Office 365 on Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, Blackberry - and only Exchange worked on them fine, and other apps didn't because of the usege of ActiveX and Silverlight technologies.

Reliability. Shang says that this year (in fact) GMail was available 99.99% of time. While the BPOS (the Office 365 predecessor) had a couple of significant outages.

Price. Shang says that Google Apps pricing is simple and affordable. Google Apps is US$ 5/month with no lock-ins. And "Office 365 is… well, difficult to work out with three editions, two tiers and 11 planes".

See also: Top 10 Office suites