Microsoft’s much anticipated software-as-a-service (SaaS) announcement this week proved to be anticlimactic, to say the least. The software giant essentially announced an extension of its hosted SharePoint and Exchange offerings.

Last September, Microsoft started offering the hosted versions of its Exchange Server and SharePoint Server to companies with 5,000 users or more. Now it’s making the same stuff available to Joe’s one-man shop down the street. The new offering covers e-mail and calendaring, contacts, shared workspaces, Web conferencing and videoconferencing. It will be deployed as a per-user subscription managed from Microsoft’s own servers, the company’s own servers, or a combination of both.

As Dana Gardner says, Microsoft is essentially “placing a Web shell on its old model….it’s about maintaining the base of the small businesses and department-level buyers of Microsoft products. In essence, this is defense.” But as for Microsoft Office up in the clouds (computing that is), don’t hold your breath…Microsoft won’t be entering the world of true multi-tenant or multi-instance architectures anytime soon.

Ala their “open source” announcement a few weeks ago, the announcement is a step in the right direction and an indication that Microsoft is warming up to the ideas of SaaS and hosted standards. Chalk it up to the company’s long and storied proprietary-based history or simply to the fact that its sheer size leaves it a step or two behind the competition, but Redmond still has a long way to go before catching up to, if ever, the on-demand world we live in today.