Mar 10
The next installment of Microsoft Office may ship for FREE! Office 14 would be a free ad supported version, this could be ad’s to buy the bigger better version of Office, or maybe something along the lines of Google ads. Microsoft Business Division Chief Stephen Elop announced “There’s an opportunity to draw those pirate customers into the revenue stream. We want to draw them into the Windows family and maybe there’s an upsell opportunity later”. There could be a few reasons for this move.
- Rival any other free alternatives such as OpenOffice.
- Rival Piracy, by providing it free you take away the need to download it illegally and spend time cracking it.
You also have to wonder what the free version will be missing from the full paid for version, besides the ads.
Good news for IT Managers around the world, its rumoured that Office 14 will still support XP, and it definitely will support the new Windows 7.