Microsoft announced today that it will make Office for Mac 2011 available in over 100 countries at the end of October. It will be available in Home and Student and Home and Business versions.

The company also announced that starting today, if customers purchase Office 2008 for Mac, they’ll be able to upgrade to 2011 for free when it becomes available.

An attorney general is suing a Redmond-based e-commerce service providing company, which had faltered on its promises of bringing up Web Traffic for a number of small businesses, driving many customers to file complaints.

Attorney General Rob McKenna reportedly stated that, “When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull a high ranking. Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didn’t always receive the top listings and other services they were promised.”

Microsoft is taking its Office program and going online. The next release of Microsoft Office will include Office Web applications, “lightweight” versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

The company’s announcement follows yesterday’s unveiling of its cloud-based Web apps operating platform, Windows Azure, and both are “part of a strategic companywide shift toward embracing web-based solutions.”

Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail (which he sold to Microsoft) is now trying to take on Microsoft Office and Google Docs, launching an online office suite.

While that in and of itself is a perfectly fine (albeit difficult) project, Sabeer’s methods are surprisingly self-destructive. His Live Documents site (a name that makes you think of Microsoft’s Office Live) uses Office 2007’s “Ribbon” interface, designed in Flex, to power document editing, spreadsheets and presentations.

A project to construct a massive datacenter near Chicago complements Microsoft’s establishment of other centers in Washington State and near San Antonio.

When someone gets a new house or apartment, visitors generally feel obliged to “ooh” and “aah” a bit for the owner’s sake.  Prices and pics of Facebook’s New York office have circulated, however, and they’re creating more of a “you-paid-what?!?” effect.

Like Google and Yahoo before it, eBay is eyeing Asia and the best ways to succeed in that region.  And although eBay is focusing on a slightly different group of countries, it, like Google, intends to concentrate on the mobile market.

We all know that many of Google’s offerings are free, and that the rest of them are cheap; for this, we are grateful.  But according to none other than Eric Schmidt, the search giant may also have kept Microsoft on a budget-minded path.