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Microsoft’s plans to offer Office Web applications for free to 400 million Windows Live subscribers is a stroke of genius. Or is it?
When the software giant announced plans to offer free lightweight versions of its ubiquitous Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint at its Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 in New Orleans on Monday, the news was staggering. Think about it. Who would have pictured Microsoft giving away even scaled-back applications from its Office suite just a few years ago?
Much is being made of the inroads that Google has made with Google Apps, including the 15 million customers it has attracted with its own free suite of online applications. Just to put this in some perspective, Microsoft has about 500 million estimated Office users. Microsoft is still king of the desktop but they’re making a bold move by going directly after Google.
Microsoft’s free Office software is part of Microsoft Office 2010, which has just entered the technical preview stage in development. Microsoft plans to make Office 2010 and related products available as both a hosted subscription service and as a premise-based suite sometime in the first half of 2010. It’s a way of trying to blunt Google’s near-term progression while offering a hybrid model for delivering Office 2010 several months down the road. Or another way of saying, ‘We’ve listened to the market and we’re also going to offer free personal productivity software. Check back with us in about a year.’
It’s doubtful that Google and Zoho will wrest millions of corporate users away from Microsoft between now and mid-2010. Microsoft hasn’t divulged what features the paid-for version of Office 2010 will have that the free online software won’t carry. This is a delicate balancing act Microsoft will have to manage as it tries to hold onto its paid customer base.
If you listen to some pundits and bloggers – and there are a ton of them who feel strongly about this – Google Docs isn’t nearly as robust as Office. Security concerns have also kept enterprise customers from jumping ship to Google Apps.
But you have to wonder how Microsoft is going to make Office 2010 compelling enough for enterprise customers to continue to pay while ensuring that the free Office applications are still better than any applications you might download from Google, Zoho or from anyone else.
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