Office pirates beware: Microsoft about to put in the boot

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 29 October 2006 21:02

Your IT - Entertainment

While it is a free Office suite, you can pay for an offline version that you can run anytime, whether you’re connected to the Internet or not. However the free online version, which also gives you 1Gb of online storage space, works very well, and as long as you have an Internet connection, you’re good to go.

Other Office alternatives include 602PC Suite with a free trial, and EasyOffice, with a free version that’s for home use only (along with inexpensive paid versions for business use) although of all of these, Open Office and ThinkFree Office are probably the best ones to go for as free alternatives go.

What will you do for your next Office suite? Pay several hundred dollars to Microsoft for Office 2007, or see if you can live with one of the free (or inexpensive) alternatives? As Stan Beer explains in his ITWire article ‘Windows licensing no longer a question of trust’, the same now exists with the venerable Office suite. Microsoft is trying to get money out of all those people who’ve pirated Office over the years.

The question is, will those users pay? Or will they continue with a software package they can legally download for free? Only time will tell. It’s certainly much easier for ‘most people’ to load, learn and use an alternative to Office than it will be for ‘most people’ to learn Linux.

The empire that was built on a massive global user base of pirates, coupled with vast numbers of paid for copies in business, government, education and by everyday consumers, is about to start making sure that both hard core pirates and casual copiers are stopped in their tracks.

For pirates, the gravy train is fast coming to a stop. You’ll have to start using free Office suites instead, or bite the bullet and pay.