Wow.  Microsoft has announced that in 2010 it will begin giving away a version of its flagship Office productivity suite as an online toolset. On his Big Tech blog at Fortune Magazine Jon Fortt tells the story in “Microsoft Office to go online - for free.” He tells us, “…this bold move to the web [is] either the dumbest thing the company has ever done, or a stroke of genius. If Microsoft gets this wrong, it will cannibalize its own Office business, and investors will howl. If it gets this right, Microsoft will crush Google, Zoho, and all the other rivals who are nibbling away at Office’s dominance.”

Plenty of comments, as can be expected.  Does this make you happy? Suspicious? Somewhere in between?

This gets me thinking about the Open Courseware Consortium, where college courses from across the globe can be audited for free.

I guess Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” is now, if it was not before, required reading. And the good news? You can get the audiobook free from Audible.com by following this link, and from Scribd.com as a digital book here.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. It has been tagged with chris anderson, free, office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.