Microsoft Office Offered as Subscription Service

According to Yahoo News, Microsoft will begin to offer its Office line on a subscription service within the next month. If you are not familiar with this method of selling software, in essence, a user pays Microsoft OneCare $70 per year to use the included programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNet) instead of purchasing Microsoft Office for $200 each time a new version is released. This method of software purchasing has the potential to assist the legal market by spreading software costs over the course of a number of years instead of large expenditures every 5 years.

Many experts foresee this as Microsoft’s first foray into the SaaS (Software as a Service) method of distributing software much as Google’s last year. Examples of this type of software include RocketMatter and Clio, both practice management services which reside on the ‘cloud’ or Internet servers instead of on the user’s computer.

One thing is for sure, when Microsoft enters into a market, it has shown enough potential to become the ‘next big thing’ and definitely part of what hip people are referring to as Web 3.0.