A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes.

Since it launched in late 2012, Microsoft has positioned its Surface tablet as a fun, hip alternative tablet, emphasizing its construction and form factor. That failed. So with its latest commercial, Microsoft has returned to its corporate roots: productivity.

Apps, Google's flagship product for enterprise IT, had a minor presence at this week's I/O developer conference, but some announcements at the show and in prior weeks deserve attention from customers of the cloud email and collaboration suite.

A new mobile application from Harmon.ie promises to improve the way people use Microsoft Office 365 from iOS, BlackBerry and Android tablets and phones.

Google is rolling out a new IT administration console for its Apps email and collaboration cloud suite and for other enterprise products such as Maps Coordinate and Chrome OS devices.

I'm all in with Microsoft. I've got Windows 8 running on my primary work machine, I subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium , and I use almost every online consumer service that the company offers.

Microsoft plans to accelerate improvements in Office Web Apps, the browser-based version of the Office suite, adding features like real-time co-authoring of documents and the ability to run in Android tablets via mobile Chrome browser support.

Office 365 users will increasingly be able to import contacts from external applications after the suite's initial rollout of this capability for Facebook and LinkedIn.

Microsoft Word remains the world's beefiest and most popular word processing program. It's no easy task to simplify an application that has accumulated 30 years' worth of features, but Microsoft has improved the 2013 edition in several key ways, starting with a polished Read Mode and embedded PDF edits.

The next generation of Office is here, and while it's not necessarily an essential upgrade for Office 2010 users, it's easily the best Office suite to date. Editing complicated financial spreadsheets has never been so semi-seamless!

For the first time Microsoft is tempting Office users to rent, not own, software that for decades they've bought as a standalone program. It's not a foreign proposition. We pay annual subscription fees for our anti-virus software. Last April, Adobe rolled out its Creative Cloud subscription package for renting Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver.

Office 365 Home Premium, Microsoft's new subscription-based version of Office 2013, lets you use your applications anywhere. But does it really cost less than the client version?

When Ben Fried left his post as IT managing director at Morgan Stanley and took over as Google's CIO in May 2008, he knew what he was getting into: supporting a user base full of technology experts and computer industry stars, like co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt and Vice President Vint Cerf. In a recent interview with IDG News Service, Fried spoke candidly about his job and shared tips and advice for fellow CIOs, including the urgent need for tablet device strategies. An edited transcript of the interview follows.