Quote:
Originally Posted by Tareith
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The entire industry is moving this way, not just Microsoft. The industry doesn't want you to own software - they want to sell you "services" over the web where you never actually have the software, thus making contemporary pirating techniques obsolete. I read somewhere that HP, for example, wants to start giving away their print cartridges and, instead, start charging on a "per print" basis. It's all sectors of the industry.
The story misrepresents the cost a little. If you were to buy the Full Retail version of Office, it would cost you
a little over $300 . Divided by $70 a year, that's over 4 years which is approximately the lifecycle of the product before a refresh comes out. Now they
do hit you on upgrades which become irrelevant at that point.
The catch is that they're not actually selling you MS Office - they're bundling it with OneCare and charging a $70 renewal fee which is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that many people are already familiar with paying an annual fee for security software (McAfee, Symantec, ESET/NOD32, Kaspersky, etc). The bad news is that the subscription fee is so high. We'll see how well this actually plays out in the real world, however, as I'm positive that the aforementioned companies will strongly object to MS bundling Office with their OneCare security product, much like they objected to MS locking down the Vista kernel (and, consequently, causing MS to cave and give them access).
I don't think this is over yet as it generates a strong reason for people to
not buy those other companies' security products and, where MS is concerned, the governments of the world always seem too eager to step in and tell MS what they can and cannot do with their products (which I personally find quite scary - what MS can do is more heavily regulated than guns).