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Microsoft's Free, Online Version of Office To Premiere This Week
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft will offer an online version of Office 2010 for free. I have to wonder, will this remain free indefinitely? Or is Microsoft just trying to firmly establish its OOXML standard, then go back to business as usual?" Probably a harder sell after Google's acquisition of DocVerse.
I don't really understand this FUD.
Are you serious or are you just that stupid? Microsoft's entire business model is based on locking their customers into formats of one form of another. I mean, I guess the whole embrace, extend, extinguish never happened, right? Yeah.
Internet explorer started out being fairly standards compliant too until they squished Netscape out of existence. Then we had IE6 for the better part of a decade and a whole internet full of "We're sorry, we don't support your browser." You'd have to be the dumbest motherfucker on the face of the Earth not to suspect that MS will attempt to do the same thing to OOXML when and if they eliminate their competitors.
I understand fear of the old pre-2007 formats since they were impossible to read without Microsoft's software, but the modern formats can be unzipped and your content is available plain as day. I'm no Microsoft apologist, but in this case your fear is unfounded.
Based on their past behavior, it is a virtual certainty that they are trying to figure out a way to stop you from doing just that. And you are an arrogant prick if you honestly think you are so smart that you can just get around it.
Do you still use Google to look for "linux problems" or did your master tell you to switch to Bing?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Is Microsoft slowly changing it's business model ? Selling Microsoft Office licenses is one of the major sources of revenue.
And at what point will there be a free windows version ?
YES, Microsoft is changing their business model big time. Steve Ballmer announced in his recent University of Washington speech that Microsoft is dedicating 70% fo their software engineers to creating cloud-based versions of their local software, and by next year it will increase to 90%. They were slow to adopt the cloud but plan to become a big contender in a short amount of time.
The speech is about 90 minutes long and is very interesting, for those who care to watch. He's quite a good speaker with a very good knowledge of the industry, and he handles people's questions directly and in detail. What impressed me most was that he openly praises other companies and their cloud apps like Salesforce and Google.
What? No frothing mouth and crazy rants?
Ballmer must be on his meds finally.
Be seeing you...