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The Microsoft Office Rental Program
LWATCDR writes "Yes, it looks like Microsoft is going to a rental program for Office.
From the article,
'The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year.'
Well I for one will be happy to stick with OpenOffice for now. From Microsoft's point of view it means a constant flow of money. For the customer it means you only have to pay a little each year instead of a lot every few years. I don't think this will save the average user any money and I wonder about problems with 'activation.'
So will this fly, or will it give a big push to OpenOffice?
"For the customer it means you only have to pay a little each year instead of a lot every few years."
The problem is more along the lines of, "this means MSFT can tax the consumer every year instead of the consumer using the same copy of Office they've been using since 97 or 2000 which still works just fine."
It's astonishing how tripe like this continues to get modded up on Slashdot. First, modern 32-bit preemptive OSs don't do "TSRs". Secondly, Office hasn't had a startup helper since Office 2003. (OSA.EXE is still there but individual Office apps run it when they need to).
Also, it's pretty pathetic to see the TSR excuse trotted out to defend OO.o's slowness -- it's pretty much the same excuses we heard when Seamonkey came out, i.e., ooh, Microsoft uses "s3kr3t" tricks to make IE faster. Today, Firefox starts pretty fast, thanks to extensive tuning and optimisation and no-one needs that excuse any more. What the OO.o guys should do is take a page from Mozilla.com's book and improve their own engineering.
> It's still not fancy but it's a great workhorse, gets the
> job done, and is free.
When I need something that's not fancy and is free, I'll use Google Docs, thank you very much. Or (for offline) Abiword. Simply saying "try OO.o because it's not MSO" isn't helpful. Note that this is exactly like Seamonkey/Firefox: Seamonkey didn't get wide adoption because it was slow and unwieldly. Firefox gave users the same engine in a slimmer browser, and surprise surprise, it became very popular.
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