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Google Apps for Work has a new name: G Suite
As predicted, Google Apps for Work has a new name. Calendar, Drive, Docs, Gmail, Maps for Work, Search for Work, Sheets and Slides all fall under "G Suite" now. A few of those items might jump out at you as being Google Apps for Work. It all falls under Google Cloud (the backend powering everything), as TechCrunch writes, and will encompass Chromebooks too. Nope, definitely not unnecessarily complicated at all. The whole reason for the change? Proving that the search juggernaut is all about its enterprise customers. "We are the full power of Google in the Cloud," the company's Diane Greene said. "We are Google Cloud." That's one way of showing off your confidence, I guess. The company promises G Suite will continue to grow, with built-in collaboration being the name of the game.
Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium brings inexpensive Office power to home Macs (Updated)
Like it or hate it, Microsoft Office is the accepted standard office application suite for many companies. Once employees become accustomed to the holy trinity of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, they often decide to use those apps for home use as well. Microsoft today announced global availability of Office 365 Home Premium for Mac and PC, a cloud-based version of the productivity app suite. Rather than requiring Office to be downloaded to your Mac and then constantly updated with Microsoft's patented blend of security patches and bug fixes, Office 365 Home Premium is accessed from a web browser. Any patches, fixes, or new features are available instantly when you launch one of the apps. One other advantage? Microsoft usually waits three years between new releases of the Office suite; now features and services can be added immediately. The service can be used on up to five devices per household and is available as a subscription for US$99.99 per year. While it won't currently run on iOS devices, persistent rumors point to a release of Office 365 for iPhone and iPad later this year. Unlike Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, which only provides Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, the cloud suite adds OneNote, Publisher and Access. To store your documents, Microsoft provides 20 GB of SkyDrive cloud storage on top of that available with a free SkyDrive account. If you make Skype international calls, Microsoft adds 60 free minutes per month so you can talk to family, friends or business associates. Update: Several TUAW readers pointed out that only the standard Office apps are available to Mac users, meaning that they will pay the same subscription fee as PC users but get only about half of the applications. In addition, the Office on Demand feature that streams the full Office 365 apps to any Internet-connected PC (like a business center PC, for example) isn't available to Mac users as it requires Windows 7 or 8. You don't need to pay up front to try the cloud apps included in Office 365 Home Premium. There's a 30-day trial available for free at Office.com. Of course, if you're allergic to all things from Redmond, you can always use Google Drive's free Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Form and Drawing cloud apps.
AT&T Cloud Architect: lets devs build their own clouds
We're here at the AT&T Developers keynote and CTO John Donovan just revealed that the network is building AT&T Cloud Architect. It's a developer-centric cloud that will help devs build cloud apps. There's a full API coming soon with a flexible pricing structure: you can pay monthly or hourly depending on your needs. It's also joining the OpenStack architecture, which Ma Bell's gonna rely upon to support the platform -- reportedly the first US telecom provider to do so. The company's planning to optimize APIs to the extent that 10 billion API calls will be made before the end of 2012.
