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.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:04 PM
So instead of cracking the software, now ‘we’ have to get a “remove ads” crack?
Well done Microsoft!
Retards.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:51 AM
Where there is a will, there is a way.
People will still get the full version with the ads, and spend time cracking it.
Its just what people do… Sorry to say.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:24 PM
I think this might be a good move for 2 reasons.
There will always be some people that want to use office but will never pay for it. It’s fairly expensive and so is a massive barrier to users purchasing it. By making a free addition – even if it has embedded ads it means that users will be given the option to legitimately use the software without paying a dime. The corporate users that formerly paid for the software won’t want to put up with the ads and so will still pay the premium price so Microsoft will not lose much sales from this. However, those that formerly priated or used open source alternatives may be tempted to give the ad funded version a run and if the ads aren’t too intrusive keep it.
The 2nd reason is that advertisers will be told the install base and number of downloads for the ad powered version not how many have since ditched it it or applied a hack. This means that even if a large portion apply a ad blocking hack it will not be reflected in the figures presented to potential sponsors and so doesn’t hurt Microsoft’s potential to make revenue from it. Obviously if ad impressions are tracked it will be reduced by blocking but often the ad blockers just make the ads not visible and do not stop the request for the ad being sent and so will possibly count as an impression. We also don’t know how online elements of the app will be intergrated – if there is a lot of cloud or web dependant features embedding the ad into the online component maybe unstoppable.
Also Microsoft can detect/knows a lot of systems are running pirated copies of it’s software but does nothing about it – this keeps up it’s install base even if it doesn’t make a sale from it. With this app being free they could chose to cripple/disable apps that attempt to block ads making it harder to hack and if aggressively blocked with every update like sony/apple firmware does to the iphone/psp it could leave the average user going for an unhacked copy rather than have the hassle of regularly updating hacks and having downtime where they can’t use the app or having a app that becomes a security risk because they can’t get the regular updates.
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