Microsoft’s Office suite is the most widely used productivity software in the world, but the cloud is biting bigger and bigger chunks out of its market share as the role of the desktop gradually diminishes in the office. Workers are turning to alternatives, namely Google Docs, to view and edit their documents more conveniently, and Microsoft has responded.

Office 365 is the online version of the company’s software which serves its purpose, but it doesn’t really match up to Google Docs in terms of features and integration. So Microsoft decided to take it to another level, and recently unveiled another portion of its plans for the upcoming Office 2013 release.

The next version of the productivity suite will be available on a subscription basis, and there’s a really big emphasis on the whole accessibility part – it downloads faster and updates automatically. But Office 2013 On Demand is where it really starts to get interesting.

In a recent blog post Click to Run lead manager Paul Barr revealed that users won’t be needing to go through the installation in the first place. Instead they can log into the Office website and once they’ve entered a password, they can stream the programs they need in less than a minute. The plus side is that you don’t have to download updates because the online version is always the latest one, and Office 2013 will no longer be confined by the local hardware.

“Office on Demand is a unique feature enabled by the Click-to-Run architecture. It will be available to Office 2013 subscribers, and allows them to run temporary instances of the most popular Office applications on computers where they normally would not be able to install software. Office on Demand versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Visio, and Project will be available.”

Microsoft has been doing a lot of interesting stuff online lately. Recently the company announced plans to stream presidential debates on Xbox LIVE and add social features that will let users be a part of the process.