The Washington Post reports that Microsoft today said “it was opening to the public a test version of its ‘Office Live Workspace,’ a service that allows users to save Office documents such as memos and spreadsheets online so that they may be accessed by other users connected to the Web.  ‘We are responding to the most urgent needs of the 500 million Office users. They want to access their documents anywhere,’ said Guy Gilbert, a senior product manager for Microsoft.”

According to the Sidney Morning Herald, “Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak heaped less than lavish praise on the company’s iPhone, MacBook Air and Apple TV products when visiting Sydney this morning.  Wozniak, who created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s but ended his full-time employment with the company in the late ’80s, said he was puzzled by the lack of 3G support on the iPhone and that he didn’t believe the MacBook Air would be a hit.  ‘To tell you the truth I was really disappointed when the iPhone was introduced … half the phones in the AT&T store at the time were 3G phones,’ Mr Wozniak said during a press conference following his keynote speech at the Broadband and Beyond Conference this morning.”

In an interesting article, the ZDNet today points out that “

[t]he biggest thing this week in the world of Web software has been offline access, but it remains to be seen whether this is a real game changer or just a must-have addition that closes gaps with desktop software.” The article’s author, Larry Dignan, writes that “offline access may be a great equalizer and it’s certainly handy. But this revolution will need better applications to get users–the masses not just the early adopters–to think Webtop software is enough to chuck their familiar programs. We need to think about what the Webtop can do better than desktop applications aside from taking up less disk space.  At this stage, offline access announcements are welcome, but on the software evolution scale these steps are small. In the future, offline access won’t be a selling point at all. And it may be irrelevant if we get to the point where an Internet connection is always available.”

eWeek.com reveals that “Nokia is taking Microsoft’s Silverlight rich Internet application technology to its broad base of mobile devices.  Nokia March 4 announced plans to make Silverlight available for the Nokia S60-based smart phones running the Symbian operating system, the world’s leading smart phone software. Nokia officials also said the company will make Silverlight available for Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. The S60 platform is a complete Symbian OS-based smart phone terminal software product upon which developers can build applications.  Tom Honeybone, a senior director in Microsoft’s Developer Division who was involved in finalizing the deal with Nokia, said the agreement will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices, including S60 on Symbian smart phones from a range of manufacturers.”

The Register writes that “Members of the House of Representatives sought details on Thursday of a $30bn plan to secure federal government systems and upgrade network defenses to ward off attacks from foreign nations and online criminals.  Known as the Cyber Initiative, the Bush Administration project would dramatically reduce the number of interconnections between federal government networks and the internet and put more advanced network security in place to monitor data traffic for signs of malicious attacks.  While the five to seven year project could dramatically improve the network defenses of government agencies, lawmakers questioned whether the initiative will be too little, too late, and whether the resulting network monitoring could undermine privacy.”