Weekly #WhyMSFT Round-Up 11/25/2011

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

Microsoft Reports Over 22 Million Live@edu Users
"Office 365 for education will include everything available in Office 365 for enterprises, helping teachers save time and manage their curricula while giving students access to tools that make learning more inspiring, relevant and collaborative," Salcito writes.

Office in the Cloud
Microsoft's rich experience in office suites shines through in Office 365, and advanced document formatting is retained better than with Google Apps' while moving an offline document back and forth between a desktop and the cloud. When it comes to spreadsheets, everything we saw (Zoho included) paled when compared to the power and advanced features that Excel gurus need and get from the desktop suite on an everyday basis.

RSA SecurID Securely Locks Down Microsoft’s Cloud Services
Security specialist RSA (a division of EMC Corp.) is bringing its trademark SecurID two-factor authentication system to Microsoft Windows Azure platform-as-a-service cloud and Microsoft Office 365 cloud productivity suite.

Why Moving its Office Suite to 'Cloud' Could be Microsoft's Biggest Test in Post-PC Era
The cloud is an entirely new way of thinking about how packaged software is produced, priced, sold and supported. Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Office Division product management group is in charge of putting some of that new thinking to work. "We are really rewiring the Office business," he says.

Jean-Philippe Courtois | The PC is Not Dead, It’s Growing
Microsoft is moving from a PC world to a PC-plus world, which is the augmented world that people live in today with many smaller devices. We have many other screens and form factors like smartphones and tablet PCs to connect, but the PC is certainly not dead. In fact, it’s growing, and studies suggest the numbers will touch two billion by 2014.

Windows Phone Mango: 10 New Apps You Must Check Out
It’s never easy being a third-party app developer. Besides needing a great app idea, you must master your platform’s SDK, and then work hard to make sure your app has visibility in whatever platform ecosystem you’ve chosen to infiltrate. Enter Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which helps software devs bring their apps to market.

Survey Finds Windows Phone 7 Becoming a Favorite with App Developers
This is big news for Microsoft, because in mobile, where developers go, consumers generally follow. The joint Appcelerator/IDC survey found that 38% of developers are "very interested" in developing for the smartphone platform, a leap of 8% compared to the last quarter.