RSSMicrosoft to Offer Pay-As-You-Go Office
By Ed Oswald | Published July 17, 2007, 4:47 PM
Microsoft said Tuesday that it is offering a subscription-based payment option for Office 2007 in South Africa, continuing a test it had been running with the previous version of the productivity suite.
The option is aimed at making the software more affordable to generally less affluent consumers in emerging markets. It had been offering a similar program for Office 2003 in Mexico and Romania as well as South Africa, and has the FlexGo program for Windows.
Microsoft is considering expanding the program to other markets, but no announcement has been made as of yet to possible future deployments.
A three-month subscription to Office 2007 would cost 199 rand ($28.54 USD). First-time users of the program are also given three additional months free. The option is only available on new computers, Microsoft says.
Similar to the way Office trials currently expire, once the term of the rental ends without renewal, users will only be able to view documents in a reduced functionality mode.
Users have the option to rent either Office Small Business or Office Student and Teacher Edition, according to reports. Consumers must buy the rental software from where they purchased their computers.
Making its software affordable to those in developing countries has become somewhat of a priority for Microsoft. In these areas, the Redmond company is seeing much stronger competition from Linux, which is far cheaper to put on PCs, thus allowing them to be sold at a lower cost.
Office 2007 will be added to the FlexGo bundle when it refreshes the products available through the program. Currently, the leasing program only includes Windows and PC hardware, but no Office.
OPENOFFICE!!
Firefox / Thunderbird / Sunbird.
Hello! All free!
What is MS trying to do kick the poor man while he's down and take his coat?!
Score: 0
|Will it offer pro-rated refundeds for crashing out of Word when it corrupts a huge document?
Score: 0
|Yet another foul trick to have people pay even more for the already hugely overpriced office suite.
By not having to pay as much upfront, they hope people won't see that they'll have to pay much more in the long run.
Also, even if people should decide to stop their subscription, they'll have to pay new monthly fees whenever they need to access their documents because of MS's propietary document format lock-in.
Score: 0
|This seems to be the way things are going, we offer online software now too, i think the bandwidth now available to users has made this possible and will become more prominent in the next couple of years.
Steve
http://www.ledgerservices.co.uk
Score: 0
|Let's see, not only do I have to pay the Microsoft tax to access and copy my data, but now I would need to rent the software, too? Both Zoho Office and Google Apps Premium kicks the living crap out of this idiotic idea.
Note to Microsoft:
Not only do we not want to pirate your software, we don't want to rent it either.
Score: 0
|And for free they can use OpenOffice as long as they want.
Score: 0
|I'm sure glad I don't have to "go."
Score: 0
|This tastes like what happened with the auto industry. Price your product out of the reach of a typical person and hope that they will buy over time.
That's not going to work this time. One would hope that with the competition from alternatives that MS would try to compete on a price a little more.
I am not an MS basher--I think that Office has been a great product over the years, but it is not so much greater that it justifies the price tag it currently has.
Score: 0
|This isn't that great of a deal. At approximately $10/month, over the lifetime of the product you end up paying more than you would otherwise. Granted, you don't have to lay out the full cost up front, but assuming you use it for four years (as in the time between Office 2003 and 2007), you're talking about around $450.
Score: 0
|The developing countries should be looking towards openoffice.org for their inexpensive office needs. Even if they have a reduced version of windows or saving more money using linux, this would save them $450 if they were to use it for four years.
Score: 0
|