Monday, July 13th 2009
Microsoft Office Online to Go Free
Faced with a future competitor in general productivity applications, Google, which recently announced concrete plans with a web-friendly operating system, Microsoft expressed plans to make Office Online - a web-based version of Office - free. Microsoft's upcoming Office 2010 productivity suite will be available both as a paid software that you can purchase and use, and an web-based application that can be run from within a web-browser. According to the company, the upcoming Office Online is designed to work seamlessly with popular web-browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, apart from its own Internet Explorer. Currently Microsoft has a highly profitable business of selling the Office productivity suite, which amounts for $20 billion of the company's revenue. The company is working on pre-release community versions of Office 2010.
24 Comments on Microsoft Office Online to Go Free
Maybe Google's Chrome OS will be enough? Time will tell.
With that being said I wonder how many of you would cheer to see MS go the way of the dinosaur only to beg for them a year later. This trend of free stuff has me worried not only about the quality but the state of the economy and where we are going.
I'd rather be dead than red.
When something becomes a so called #1, sometimes it takes a lesser product (apply free) to point out all it's weak spots.
As I said in my previous post here, I just want the competition to make them offer their products at better prices, better licensing (one for all PCs in a household for example) and to get rid of the WGA/product activation crap.
Anyway, this is good news all round. Will force the open-source guys to up their game!