Office is THE cash cow, OneDrive is (probably) a loss leader. Anything that can be done to ensure Office's continued near ubiquity, reduce usage friction, and shore up beach heads against competitors looking for an area to drive a wedge in will be done.

Well, that's really a new Microsoft.

Just a short while ago, anything that could be done to make their products more integrated, and increase lock-in would be done. It didn't really matter if the benefited product made money or not. (For a very visible blow, look at the Windows Phone and Windows 8.)

It's great to see that changing.

OneDrive on Windows 8+ requires you to use an MS Account for your entire Windows session. So I'd have to pick a short password and do smart card support to use it. That's some pretty lame and obvious forced integration.

Office has always been the exception to that rule. Look at the long, long, long history of Office on Mac.

Why would they feel bad? They probably want to have a successful product not because the user has no option but for its own merits.

Try that line on Bill Gates in his prime.

Things are different around here. Teams are expected to deliver great products on their own, not rely on some artificial lock-in to force adoption. You see this all over - we offer Linux on Azure, you can federate AD with Google Apps, we release dozens of apps for iOS and Android, and we are opening up many many APIs for rich integration. (Opinion my own obviously).

This has been the official line for a while but it has never been that way when it actually matters (ie. Windows and Office).

That's why some people are pleasantly surprised by this.

I liked your comment and voted you up but Microsoft's Linux on Azure is really weird. It's obvious there's a windows thing somewhere up in the higher levels because of the way certs are done and ports are used. It's all very non-linuxy. If Microsoft is going to do something with linux they should do it right.

Fair points, and I have to say I'm pretty happy with the direction MS is going in these days. I have to say that an Office 365 subscription would be really nice to have, but is just too pricey. Dropbox integration is a nice feature, but is it enough? Maybe one of these days.

The more integrations, the better....

It sounds more like Microsoft wanting to bring Dropbox in to its influence area. Possible acquisition, lobbying strategy or marketing stunt sounds right.

No it sounds like Microsoft wants its users to use Office documents as opposed to Google Drive.

Box and Dropbox support office formats which makes sense why they'd partner with them to perpetuate this usage.

Kind of like what Microsoft did to Facebook.