Two things happened recently which delighted me and I thank cloud-based services (vs. locally installed apps/applications) for that.

When Office Web Apps Preview released recently, I noticed that they were talking about Excel Web App supporting the creation of Forms, but in the preview I did not see that functionality. I was really looking forward to using it because that was one thing I liked with Google Spreadsheets and wanted to see it in Excel Web App. However, last week as I was playing around with Excel Web App, I saw the “Form” entry in the Insert tab! It was greyed out but it was there and I did not even know it. No announcement, no updates to make, just there. Nice.

This morning, when I went to share an article I was reading using the Bitmarklet from bitly, I noticed that they had updated the UI for the same. Whereas earlier there was too much “noise” on the screens within that Bitmarklet window, now it was streamlined and looked much cleaner. Again, I had to do nothing to receive the updated functionality.

Granted, not everyone is comfortable getting stuff updated without their knowing, and granted sometimes functionality could be removed as opposed to added, but still, having a constantly updated “app” in the cloud/on the web is a thing of beauty. I have a feeling the next version of Office is going down that route with the Office 365 subscription and I may be one of the customers willing to pay a small fee for getting seamless updates for my software.