Microsoft is venturing in the world of the free, and has announced that they will be making a version of their popular office software available for free sometime early in 2010.  This represents a very marked shift in their corporate strategy.  Microsoft Office is one of the largest moneymakers for the company, accounting for approximately $20 billion dollars in sales annually.

This is great news for personal users, who would be more than likely not to purchase a new copy of office every couple of years.  They would rather stick with their copy of Office ’95 (or 97 or whatever) because there is no fundamental need to upgrade.  I don’t think Microsoft will lose much here.  As we all know, piracy is rampant and I’m sure that this announcement will curb that somewhat as well.  There is no need to steal something that is being given away for free.

The complimentary version of Office 2010 will run within a browser (and somewhat surprisingly, Mozilla and Firefox will be supported natively).  Microsoft will never be the corporate darling of the mass majority of users, yet their software is used by these same people worldwide.  Sometimes, I think that is a tad hypocritical, for if you do not like the company (and bitch about their products constantly) then perhaps you should not use them.

In a different track, the darling corporation of Internet users, Google, is pursuing a different track.  Their version of Google Apps now has a yearly charge of $50.00 (though the free version still remains).  It seems that they are slowly evolving into a more Microsoft-like corporation.  I do not condemn them, however.  The simple fact is that a company cannot survive by giving everything away for free.  If you live by the free, you die by the free.

Microsoft and Google are now both aggressively pursuing the corporate (or B2B) market.  Microsoft has known for years, and as Google is now finding out, that while providing their products for little or no cost to consumers, they have to profit significantly through the corporate sector to survive.  They can make money through “free” by selling advertising and so forth, but they cannot do this forever.  Eventually another company will take over.  Good examples of this are Google taking over from Yahoo, or Facebook taking over from MySpace who took over from Friendster.