With rumors floating around that Microsoft's new Office suite (yes, already) may be available for free, we thought it would be a good item of discussion. Microsoft has stated that a free version of their widely used collaboration suite will be available for use online. That's right, no software install required. As you can imagine, we tech skeptics went wild with theories on this. While cloud computing is a hot item right now there would certainly have to be a profit play for Microsoft here. Afterall, this isn't a non-profit open source group we're talking about.

You can certainly expect that the free version will be missing some features that are key for businesses. Furthermore, it's doubtful business accounts will be eligible for the free version. You can also believe that there will be some ad revenue potential. I can imagine it now, the Office equivalent of Hotmail! Regardless of how the product is released it would be hard to picture it working in all browsers, other than Internet Explorer, at 100%. Take the Outlook Web Access platform with Exchange for example. While it will work in other browsers, it is not nearly as effective in it's crippled version. It's safe to say that business customers will still need to buy licenses (box or electronic) to receive the functionality expected. The better questions concerning Office 2010 might be, is another upgrade really needed?