MS has a good idea...let's rent Office to people...

[Trooper110]

Microsoft to sell Office, OneCare for $70 a year - Yahoo! News

I forsee bad things coming from this if it's at all remotely successful. And their validation system is prone to faults as it is...what happens when the Office authentication servers go down when I have a big paper due and it takes the morons 4 days to fix it?

[WalkinTarget]

MS has wanted to move to a modular design, so you would in essence only pay for components you want/need. This makes perfect sense in their minds, and shows where we are headed for future Microsoft products.
Don't want an antivirus ?? Don't pay for it. Don't want Media Center ?? Don't buy it.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...scription.html

It really, on the surface, sounds good, but read the article to find out what issues can crop up if this does pan out as expected.


PS - Office 2007 VLK via work = I getz teh FREE !! :P

[Trooper110]

My friend's company he works for has VLK for like every MS product which I get to use if I'm very nice

MS trying to go to subscription services for their products I don't like though. They've been talking about doing it for their OS's. You pay a fee, get X updates and SPs, etc, and need to keep paying them. Then they roll out their new OS and you get updated to it automatically somehow through LiveUpdate. Which has it's share of problems already. I personally don't think MS has the technical expertise to accomplish and keep all of that running smoothly. Heck, let's just look at Vista, Vista SP1, XP SP3 to name a few in the last few years...

[WalkinTarget]

Troop .. you and I think alike on this one. I agree with you 100%. They need to tread very carefully at this point, as they are not looking like any innovation has happened in a decade. They just buy up a bit player and acquire their innovation. Ex: Giant Antispyware, Winternals, Bungie ... hell, I'll just link them all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ft_Corporation

[Thrashdragon]

They're trying to get past the sticker shock that MS Office has by appearing to sell it at a lower price. You average consumer doesn't think about having to re-up his subscription every year and will happily buy Office if it is cheap. Once that first year runs out though, everyone will go back to using pirated copies like they do now. Not a good idea for Microsoft.

[mapes]

They're trying to get past the sticker shock that MS Office has by appearing to sell it at a lower price. You average consumer doesn't think about having to re-up his subscription every year and will happily buy Office if it is cheap. Once that first year runs out though, everyone will go back to using pirated copies like they do now. Not a good idea for Microsoft.

Actually I think this is to combat googles online offerings and open office...both of which are free. Personally the only MS office type product I use is Viso for network diagrams.