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MS Planning Free Web-Based Business Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the word-gets-online-calls-some-folks-newbs dept.

nieske writes "In response to Google Apps for Your Domain, Microsoft is also planning to release free web-based business software. The software will be ad-supported, but a paid, ad-free version will also be available. From the article: 'Revenue from software licenses for Office and the Windows operating system accounts for a bulk of Microsoft revenues. The challenge for Microsoft will be to make sure a free or, possibly, a subscription-supported version of Works won't hurt sales of its dominant Office software, which accounted for a quarter of the company's $44 billion in sales last year.' Would you choose an ad-supported online version of Microsoft Office over other free options like OpenOffice or Google Apps for Your Domain?"

2 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Oh wonderful.... by KoshClassic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Knowing Microsoft, it will have features like:

    a) it only works with Internet Explorer
    b) documents saved with it will never load on anything but Microsoft products
    c) shortcuts to it will be placed in highly visible locations in all future versions of Windows
    d) it can only be accessed from PC's running licensed copies of Windows

    etc. etc. etc.

    I'll stick with Google.

    --
    Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
  2. Re:Yes. I would choose MS over the others. by chroot_james · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've tried Open Office. I used it all through college, actually. The thing that excel has is the vba programming. Before everyone flares up, we simply can't avoid vba and excel. All the business people learn to use it and it makes some heavy duty calculations TRIVIAL to model in a programmatic way. These people know excel and don't care to learn the best way to do things. They don't even care about making the spreadsheet clean and easy to read. If they can make it crunch the numbers correctly, they're happy. Since these are the people who also bring the dough into the system, we have to adapt to what their needs are. It's not necessarily sharing the data, though it would be easier than having to worry about actual files. It's about how quickly something can get the job done and when people already know excel, excel wins.

    --
    Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.