TAG | Microsoft offers Office and OneCare in US at subscription price |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 03 July 2008 | |
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Called “Microsoft Equipt”, which sounds like a quip on consumers being “equipped” to get on with things with their computers, the package aims to fend off the competition from free office suites from Google and others, competing Internet security products from the major players and help Microsoft get its US customers introduced to a yearly subscription for its software. Because it is subscription software, Microsoft is promising that as long as you are paying the yearly fee, you are automatically entitled to whatever updates, upgrades and new versions come out of either the Office Home and Student 2007 Edition, and Microsoft Live Onecare. Trailled in a program code-named “Albany”, the trial must have been a success, because the new subscription offering goes on sale in 700 Circuit City stores across the US from July 15, 2008. The Home and Student edition of Office 2007 comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote – but Outlook is sadly missing from this particular edition. Instead, Microsoft is hoping you’ll instead be happy to use Windows Live Mail, for the package also comes with that and other Windows Live tools, including Live Messenger and Live Photo Gallery, although unless I’m mistaken these particular Live tools are already free to download. Microsoft is also including the Office Live Workspace which gives consumers their own online storage area called an “online Workspace” to save files to, in addition to saving them to the hard drive. The Microsoft Live OneCare package, an Internet security suite that competes with packages from Symantec (Norton), McAfee and others rounds out the package which will retail for US $69.99. The software can legally be installed on three PCs in the home, and as a consumer only version isn’t intended for use in business environments. Didn't Microsoft try this before in other countries without much success? Why might it succeed this time? Continued on page 2. |
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