Now this seems to come to reality soon, as Microsoft just officially announced that there will be Office 2010 Web service to be made available to some 400 millions users of their free Windows Live online service.
According to the source, this Office 2010 Web service will also be free to enterprise workers, provided they are licensed for Office's software maintenance program namely Software Assurance.
You might have noticed that over the past few years, the monopolized market of Microsoft Office has been threaten by rivals such as OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, etc.
In order to counter the competition from OpenOffice.org, selling price of the current Microsoft Office 2007 has been dropping with "special discounts", especially on the Home & Students Edition (3 licenses in a box) which now selling at the price of RM1xx only.
Microsoft's move to provide Office 2010 Web for free is seen to counter the competition from the free Google Docs in the cloud.
This kind of competition is definitely good to us consumers, and we hope that the competition will sustain, so that we could get better quality software, better support, at competitive cost of ownership.
Good for the market, no one monopoly the market.
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