Rebuttal to the Idiots at Slashdot

If you haven’t read the Slashdot article “The Hidden Costs of Microsoft’s Free Office Online” by Michael_Curator, go read it.  To be fair, Slashdot tends to have a lot of people that, A) hate Microsoft, B) love Linux/Apple… well, mostly Linux.  So, anything that is posted on that site tends to be in one of those two categories.

So the article is going into detail how Microsoft plans on charging business, schools, etc, for Office Online.  Okay, first, how is this a surprise!?  They said that when they released the information on Office 2010 and Office Online!  I posted about this a few days ago when Microsoft released details.  Here is the ComputerWorld article again.  Nuf said on that argument.

Okay, so Google Docs.  For you and me it is free.  Guess what, Office Online is going to be free for you and me.  This means that most people are not going to notice a darn thing.  Guess what people, Google charges schools, business, etc, to use Google Docs!!!  OMG!  Chico State moved to Google Mail a year ago, and they do pay for it.  Guess what, Microsoft is going to do the same thing for Office Online.

There is one thing Google Docs/Mail can’t do, and that is let companies host the services internally.  Microsoft is going to allow companies to host the online services internally.  That is one reason why Google Docs can’t get into larger corporations (and another thing that article is yelling about).  Companies don’t want classified documents on a third party server they have zero control over!  So yes, since the company is hosting internally, it is going to cost more!  Not just cause you need the server software (and it looks like you need SharePoint), but you need the OS, the hardware, the infrastructure.  So for those companies Microsoft still probably wants them to use the suit, and install it on the machines.

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