MS Office to go online - For Free

[Retrolock]

Get this: Microsoft – the king of paid software – will announce today that it is going to give a version of Office away for free online. Both the online and desktop versions are scheduled to arrive in the first half of next year. Yes, you read that right. The latest version of its ubiquitous productivity software, dubbed Office 2010, will come as both a piece of software you can buy for your computer, and as a service you can access in your browser. [UPDATE: Microsoft says it will support the Firefox and Safari browsers as well as IE.]

http://bigtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/13/microsoft-office-to-go-online-for-free/

[crainger]

Cool. We'll just install 7 and everything will work, like MacOS, but EU can't sue because it doesn't come with the OS :;):

[j0j081]

wow this could be ownage.

[Sazar]

Cool. We'll just install 7 and everything will work, like MacOS, but EU can't sue because it doesn't come with the OS :;):

The EU will find a way.

[LurkerLito]

I never liked the idea of online apps. It's just asking for someone to compromise their servers then all of a sudden your identity is stolen or some mistake on their end makes your documents that you just typed available to anyone to read and edit.

[CaptNKILL]

Sounds "neat"... except for the fact that Office 2007 is probably the worst Office suite they've ever released.

The interface sucks, its slow and the program has a tendency to do whatever the hell it wants with your documents. I watched my sister open a file she was working with (some address labels connected to an address database), fix something, save it, close it, then open it again and have the problem return.

I've stuck to OpenOffice for the 2 or 3 times per year that I actually need office software, even though I own a legit copy of Office 2007 that I got through technet.

I just hope the free version of Office 2010 actually works. It'd be the perfect option for people like me that very rarely need to use a good Word processing program.

[crainger]

That's incorrect CaptN. Office 2007 is pretty good.