With the announcements in the past week or so about HP and Dell offering machines with WordPerfect instead of MS Office, there's been some discussion about what this all means for Microsoft. Business 2.0 has an interesting article that points out that Microsoft is simply a victim of Moore's Law. You can now get a white-box computer for under $400, but Microsoft Office still costs $450, which makes it a tough sell. Microsoft says they're not worried, and they're doing just fine with their current pricing plans. It will be interesting to see if that remains the case over time. Machines are going to keep getting cheaper, and it seems like things like OpenOffice are getting much better. I've been playing around with OpenOffice, and while it's not quite there yet, it's pretty close to removing any need for MS Office for me.
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