Microsoft eyes corporate customers with services

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The new services, announced on Sunday, are Microsoft's first major attempt at delivering software over the Internet as a "service" to its bread-and-butter corporate customers.

The company said it will start to offer over the next few months e-mail, instant messaging and collaboration software to companies with more than 5,000 workers. Those applications will run on computer servers inside Microsoft's data centers and then be delivered to customers over the Internet.

The new strategy is a departure from Microsoft's current business model of selling licenses for software that runs locally on a customer's own computers.

"We'll look back on this announcement and say that's when Microsoft really started to provide software plus services," said John Rymer, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "It's the first step and there is so much more to come."

Faced with competition from Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc., Microsoft is attempting to roll out services to large organizations without jeopardizing the corporate agreements that underpin many of its businesses.

Some companies like Salesforce see services eventually replacing traditional software, but Microsoft is pushing a "software plus services" strategy with the promise that this option combines the best of both worlds.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said its new Office Live Workspace is an example of the strategy.

Office Live Workspace, also unveiled on Sunday, allows workers to share Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations on the Web for free. In the Workspace, people can invite others to view and comment on documents even if they don't own Microsoft Office.

Users can save more than 1,000 Office documents on Workspace and access them through any Web browser.

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