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.

Comments

OO 3.2 kicks ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother? I swear to god, I can do anything I want in sun (oracle? no hate here.) oo32 that I used to do in o2k3

Have you seen the OO32 release? My God! hahaha

I already collect text editors, but gosh darn I just can's see paying thousands anymore? Maybe you got a translator or some proprietary nonsense? I think we all would be wise to audit and revise what we really need.

Hey if you need Microsoft Office, more power to ya, the only thing I need now is a way to export their proprietary format to a real format which can be used in oo32 ;)

Re:Business model

[M. Baranczak]

My take on it: they decided to do it because Google's doing it, and they don't want to get "left behind". Then they came up with a plausible-sounding business case for their scheme.

Re:How exactly do you pitch this to management?

[tomhudson]

Personally I find Google Docs only marginally useful even for the simplest of tasks, it would never replace a copy of Office for me.

Personally, I find any "office suite" useless for the simplest of tasks. Why do people think their to-do list or 1-page memo requires anything more complicated than plain text?

Re:Is it safe?

[grcumb]

I don't really understand this FUD. Even if Microsoft does have a slightly different flavor of OXML it's not like it's impossible to convert them to something more neutral even if Microsoft took a play from Steve Job's playbook and completely went to the dark side.

Man, you must be really, really new here.

This is exactly the problem (and the same facile response) we've been coping with since the mid-90s, and I can tell you from experience that things are never as simple as you describe.

Let's take one client I'm working with right now. They're a national institution, responsible for archiving court documents in perpetuity. That means, effectively, forever. Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?

If, however, these documents were stored in plain text markup (e.g. XML) following an open, formal and workable specification whose definitions are slightly more robust than "Do this formatting the way we did in Word 97" and which consists of slightly more than dumping blobs of binary data inside tags, we might stand a chance. It would still be a bit of an ask, but in the worst case scenario, we could probably infer (or ignore) the parts that puzzled us most.

Document formats matter because a great many of them -especially those produced by the public sector- have historical value and need to be preserved for a very long time.