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Microsoft Launching Ad-Supported 'Office Starter', Retiring Works

by Terrence O'Brien on October 10, 2009 at 02:25 PM

Microsoft To Retire Works, Launching Ad-Supported Office StarterMicrosoft has spread itself pretty thin in recent years by offering a bewildering array of products that often have overlapping feature sets or compete directly with one another. This confusion, combined with the increasingly ridiculous fees for joining Club Microsoft, has helped out competitors like Google, Apple, and Open Office.

This problem has been no clearer than it has in the productivity software field, where the nearly useless Microsoft Works, often packaged for free with new PCs, has been losing customers to more full-featured and free competitors. But Microsoft has been making moves to consolidate its Office product line: launching a Web-based version of the tool, ditching Entourage for a proper Mac version of Outlook, and now offering an ad-supported, free version of Office with some of the more advanced features stripped away.

The new Office Starter package will come with more spartan, yet functional versions of Word and Excel. Starter will now be packaged with Windows 7 PCs, replacing both Works and the free trial version of Office, which in the past expired after 60 days. The free Web and Starter versions of Office will feature the now-familiar 'ribbon' interface and will likely stem the tide of consumers ditching Microsoft products for free alternatives. This might also discourage people from pirating copies of Office, since the two most essential apps, Word and Excel, will now be offered in (legally) free versions.

It may have taken longer than it should have, but Microsoft is finally starting to realize that, in the modern Web era, offering quality products for free is a perfectly viable business model. [From: CNET and Download Squad]

Tags: Microsoft, microsoft office, microsoft office starter, MicrosoftOffice, MicrosoftOfficeStarter, office, office starter, OfficeStarter, top

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