Weekly #WhyMSFT Round-Up 6/17/2011

Each week, we round up industry news and articles that you may have missed. Enjoy this week’s selections: 

Government Focus:  

Cloud Basics: Before You Enter the Cloud

When government agencies weigh the risks associated with moving to the cloud, they usually think of security and regulatory compliance needs, but another risk for political and IT decision-makers is the challenge of entering the cloud without a clear strategy for how the technology will meet your business needs.

What Government IT Can Learn From the Private Sector

In early May, Kundra invited a half-dozen CIOs from the private sector, as well as seven of his government CIOs plus an administrative official from the federal CIO Council, to the White House for a three-hour meeting to discuss best and next practices in enterprise IT. Topics included emerging technologies and IT architectures, organizational structure and culture, cloud computing, and ways to improve customer service.InformationWeek editors facilitated and attended that meeting.

OMB Teeing up Financial HR Systems for the Cloud

Federal financial and human resources systems are among the next government systems that will move to the cloud. Vivek Kundra, federal chief information officer, said today that agencies run more than 500 financial and more than 500 human resources systems across government, and it's an area ripe for savings by moving them to a cloud service provider .

The Microsoft Advantage

Office 2010: A Record-Breaking First Year

When we released Office 2010 to the world one year ago, our critics weren't easy on us. They said we were heading in the wrong direction by continuing to invest in our desktop applications in addition to the cloud. Even more recently, there've been more predictions of the PC's demise. But the reality is, based on the market results we see in our sales and adoption data, people continue to love Office on the desktop and they're embracing Office in the cloud.

Microsoft Office Web Apps May Have Surpasses Google Docs

Nearly 50 million people use Office Web Apps monthly, Microsoft said Wednesday morning. Microsoft started offering free Web versions of Office for the first time last year. The last time Google gave an estimated numbers on people using Google Docs and the pay version Apps, the company said it had 25 million active users. On Wednesday, Google vaguely said it had "tens of millions" of users.

Microsoft “Windows 8” Could Challenge Google Android in Tablets

Sarah Rotman sees Windows 8 as potentially giving Android some major headaches. “Consumers prefer Windows to Android on tablets by a wide margin: 46 [percent] of U.S. consumers considering buying a tablet prefer Windows on that tablet, compared with 9 [percent] who prefer Android, according to a Forrester study conducted in January 2011.”

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