Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 31st Jul 2007 23:53 UTC, submitted by rx182
"Microsoft's next version of its small-business/home productivity suite, due imminently, will be free and ad-funded. Microsoft Works 9.0 - which will be the new product's name, if Microsoft opts to stick with its current nomenclature - might also debut at some point as Microsoft-hosted low-end productivity service, as many have been speculating. A hosted version of Works would give Microsoft a head-to-head competitor with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other consumer- and small-business focused services, analysts have said."
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Member since:
2007-08-01
The adware model in its simplest manifestation is easily contravened by denying the application the network access it needs to download new ads (any competent firewall has this capability). This might cause problems if, say, the program is a p2p application, but there's no inherent reason that a word processor needs internet access. One can then simply find where the ads are stored and delete them. If the application is programmed not to function without them, it's simple enough to just leave placeholder images there that are the same color as the interface. All this could be accomplished automatically by a very rudimentary utility, so the effort only needs to be invested once.
If Microsoft really plans to make this an important part of its business strategy, they must expect that either the ads will not be sufficiently annoying to motivate such measures or else they have some kind of countermeasure in mind. Could this be another arms race in the making like the one against DRM designers and DRM busters? As long as the computer is in the control of it's users, it seems futile for MS. Microsoft of course realizes this, so they're trying incrementally to divest computer users of control over their own machines. It has often been pondered what Microsoft has to gain by working with "content providers" to incorporate DRM into the core of the operating system, and now we see one of the many advantages of their designs beginning to become apparent. MS Works is not a core business asset, so it would not be at all surprising if they're trying an experimental strategy on it that could conceivably be expanded to other product lines, or even to the OS itself.
Edited 2007-08-01 03:32