WinInfo: Microsoft Feeling the Office Licensing Pinch

“Years ago, as I downloaded floppy disk images of an up and
coming new operating system called Slackware Linux to my Windows 95
PC, I rhetorically asked a colleague how Microsoft would respond if
the open source community ever supplied a credible Microsoft Office
challenger at little or no cost. Back then, the only major
challengers to Office were similar products–with similar price
tags–from Corel and Lotus, making Microsoft’s suite a pretty
obvious choice: After all, which company could make a more
integrated product than the one that made the underlying operating
system?

“Regardless, the question remained: What would happen if some
entity–a company, individual, or group of programmers–cloned the
10 percent of Office that most people actually used and then
offered the product to the public for free or for significantly
less money than Microsoft Office…?”

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