We finally have some pricing details to share regarding Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 platform. In a recent blog post, the software giant laid out the details for both consumers and businesses. On the consumer side, an Office 365 Premium subscription will start at $8.33 per month, billed annually at $99.99, which covers up to five users. It will be available in both physical and online stores across 227 markets worldwide, Microsoft says. There will also be a free 30-day trial available.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced Glacier, an inexpensive cloud-based data archive service primarily aimed at enterprise and small business users willing to go with a tapeless solution. There's no free tier to choose from like there is with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), but for data heavy users that require 5TB of redundancy or more, pricing starts at just a penny per gigabyte per month.

Microsoft has updated its SkyDrive cloud service with a fresh coat of paint, modern digs, and taught it all new dance moves on the Web and desktop, the company announced today. SkyDrive.com now features instant search, a contextual toolbar, thumbnail multi-select, drag-and-drop organization, and HTML5 sorting, though those aren't the only improvements Microsoft made to its cloud service.

Microsoft's inevitable Office 2013 announcement could be seen coming from a mile away, and now that the Redmond software maker has finally unveiled its next generation productivity suite, it's time to wade through the rhetoric to see if we can make heads or tails of it all. That's easier said than done. While Microsoft is making a concerted effort to simplify the decision making process with Windows 8 by offering just a few editions to choose from, users will ultimately have a bevy of online and offline Office versions to sift through.