Microsoft adds Excel surveys to SkyDrive
Microsoft announced a couple of months ago that it planned to put in support for Excel surveys in its SkyDrive cloud service. Today, the company announced that this particular feature has finally been added for SkyDrive users.
Context & Ripple Effects
SkyDrive has spent the past year-and-a-half being rebuilt from a file dump into a platform: the HTML5 rewrite of the web client landed in mid-2011, Microsoft framed it as personal cloud storage 'for billions of people' that November, and in April 2012 it opened SkyDrive APIs so third-party apps could read and write user data. Excel surveys are the next step in that arc — instead of only storing documents created elsewhere, SkyDrive now hosts lightweight document creation itself.
The pickup was broad for a single-feature announcement: The Windows Blog, Winsyde, WMPoweruser and LiveSide all carried it on the day, reflecting how closely the enthusiast press tracks SkyDrive as the connective tissue of Microsoft's consumer ecosystem.
First-order effects
- SkyDrive users can now build and distribute Excel surveys entirely in the browser, with responses collected into a spreadsheet — no desktop Office install required, which matters for the non-Windows and mobile visitors SkyDrive's HTML5 client was built to serve.
- Microsoft gains a free-forms tool inside its consumer cloud at zero marginal cost, deepening the reason for existing SkyDrive accounts to stay signed in.
Second-order effects
- The timing is not incidental: Windows Phone 8 handsets reached US buyers on November 8 and the Surface tablet is shipping with its storage controversy still fresh, so every SkyDrive capability added now doubles as software attach for hardware that needs an ecosystem story.
- Rival consumer cloud suites that pair storage with free web apps face pressure to match form-building, since surveys are one of the few spreadsheet tasks casual users perform often enough to anchor them to a service.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cloud storage becomes undifferentiated plumbing and competition shifts to the lightweight applications layered on top of it — exactly the trajectory SkyDrive's own 'storage for billions' framing points toward, with Microsoft using Office's brand to pull consumers into its cloud rather than the reverse.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage is evolving from passive file hosting into lightweight web productivity suites, with Microsoft extending Excel's reach through SkyDrive rather than desktop installs.