Microsoft: Office 14 Web apps should run on Macs

In a surprise correction of information BetaNews received at PDC 2008 last month, a Microsoft spokesperson now says its forthcoming Office Web apps with Office 14 will run on platforms other than Windows.

Exact details of how this feat will take place have not been completely ironed out at present. However, cross-platform execution is apparently a principal goal of Office Web applications. This statement from a Microsoft spokesperson to BetaNews last night corroborates a Channel 10 blog post by an independent contributor to Microsoft, and a Gregg Keizer Computerworld report that followed.

"The information in the Channel 10 article is accurate," spokesperson Scott Massey told BetaNews. "Silverlight (and/or the .NET Framework) are not required by the Office Web apps. They run cross-platform and cross-browser, and will use Silverlight if available, but will run using AJAX if not."

Based on Microsoft's current security model, what happens in an "if-not" situation would probably be that graphics for the online Word and Excel versions would look somewhat different. Access to the cache of installed fonts is possible through Silverlight, though not permissible using browser-based technologies alone. Without Silverlight or the full .NET Framework installed on a system, documents that use fonts installed on the user's system that aren't necessarily Web fonts, may not be visible through the browser...unless Microsoft has figured out, or plans to figure out, a workaround for that problem. At PDC, no such plans were mentioned.

Although use of the Web apps could still require the use of Office Live Workspace as a secure storage area for documents being edited online, Massey stated that the current beta of Office Live Workspace is "currently accessible on a Mac via Firefox." The experience for Mac users isn't identical to that for Windows users, at least not now, though "Mac users can work with Office Live Workspace as a file store today," he said.

Massey went on to tell BetaNews that while the Office Web apps will "have ties to Office Live," they will not require the user to be licensed for the traditional Office desktop suite. Exactly how the company's revenue model will work in that instance has yet to be determined, though evidently a subscription model is being considered.