It seems odd that Microsoft would (at least at first) exclusively sell this package through Circuit City. There doesn't seem to be any good reason to restrict the sale of Equipt to just one retailer, unless Microsoft is just trying to test the waters here to see how the public will react to a subscription service. While software subscriptions are common in the business market, consumers are used to buying their software outright, with maybe the exception of anti-virus software, which might explain the combination of OneCare and Office.

For users who already subscribe to OneCare at $49.95 a year, Equipt is a bargain at only $20 more a year. Subscribing to Equipt just for the Office package, though, might be less of a deal, especially given that Microsoft doesn't always upgrade Office every two years and that most users don't always need to have the latest version of MS Office.

Equipt clearly points in the direction that Microsoft wants to be going with software subscriptions - the question will be if mainstream users are ready.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_equipt_office_and_on.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_equipt_office_and_on.php News Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:47:30 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Recently I had the great pleasure to hear the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, give the keynote at the Tetherless World Conference organized by Rensellaer Polytechnique Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY (see RWW's live blogging of the event). He is such an entertaining and thought-provoking speaker that it is hard to isolate one nugget, but after a few weeks I am still thinking about one comment he made about start-up entrepreneurs conducting social science experiments.

"The World Wide Web changed the ways people work, play, communicate, collaborate, and educate. But without new research aimed at understanding the current, evolving and potential Web, we may miss or delay opportunities for new and revolutionary capabilities.

To model the Web, to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth, and to ensure it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, personal control over information, and respect for social boundaries, then we must pursue a research agenda that targets the Web and its use as a primary focus of attention."

Rensselaer's Tetherless World Constellation addresses this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and its future use.

Faculty in the constellation explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and develop new technologies and languages to expand the capabilities of the Web.

We use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information-centric views. We aim to make the next generation Web natural to use while responsive to a growing variety of policy and social needs."

The point is that we study Computer Science but the Web is a lot more than the application of Computer Science. It is the social dimension that makes it interesting and nobody has been systematically studying that. For scientists this is marvelous unexplored territory. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, being a scientist, looks at all the wild, apparently chaotic Web 2.0 innovation in the same way a scientist looks at experiments. In that context, entrepreneurs run experiments by launching something onto the Web. If it "catches fire", the investors clamor to get on board and people make a lot of money. If it fails in the market, people lose money. But to a scientist, both results are equally useful, providing additional data points from which theories can be deduced.

It is personally exciting for me to have Rensellaer take such a leadership position in this emerging science as they are close to where I live in what has historically been the "sleepy government town of Albany". All the tech action was either south to New York City or east to Boston. There have been attempts for some time to create a Tech Valley high tech zone in the area. But this new drive by Rensellaer will make a difference.

Rensellaer have brought in some real academic leaders to drive this initiative, including Jim Hendler and Deborah McGuiness:

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science. He is a Fellow of both the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society.

He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded the US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002.

He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Deborah McGuinness is of the creators of the Web language that is ushering in the next generation of the World Wide Web -- the OWL Web Ontology Language -- Deborah McGuinness is widely known in her field.

McGuinness comes to Rensselaer from Stanford University where she last led the Knowledge Systems Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

McGuinness has published more than 100 papers on knowledge-based systems, ontology environments, configuration, search technology and intelligent applications and holds five patents. Prior to joining Stanford, McGuiness worked for Bell Laboratories (later AT&T) were she co-developed a predecessor language to today's ontology Web language.

She is CEO and president of her own consulting firm and is on the board of the Semantic Web Science Foundation as well as a number of startup companies. She is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Rensellaer is clearly staking a position in the elite technology world usually reserved for Stanford and MIT. This will create some new technology. I caught an early glimpse of some of the web technology coming out of the Rensellaer labs and it looked very exciting. I intend to go back to there and report on that in a future post.

Combine this with a good quality of life and lower cost of living (compared to say New York City or Silicon Valley) and you get a fertile environment for start-ups.

Though a price point has yet to be set, so it remains unclear whether Albany will offer an significant savings over purchasing its components separately, it is significant for two reasons. First, it adds a wrapper around each of its compotents that automatically sets them up for consumers in just a couple of clicks. The wrapper acts as a launcher for the various pieces of Albany, which includes office, productivity, messaging, and security software, and also keeps the compontents up to date.

Second, Albany will be offered as a subscription service, and users will be entitled to automatic upgrades for the duration of their subsciption contract. It's not quite a web app, but it does take a page out of the web app play book by going the subscription route -- a direction that Microsoft is known to be heading.

While Albany, which will get a new name for before a launch tentatively scheduled for later this year, is not as compelling as the true online office web application that we've all be waiting and hoping for, it is still a shot at Google's online office offerings. Clearly, this is a consumer play for Microsoft, and Google's office suite is not ready for the enterprise (see also here from Zimbra and here from Microsoft).

Even though Albany won't be a true web office offering, it is a likely low-cost alternative to Google Docs that lives on a user's PC -- something that is still more comfortable and familiar to many mainstream users -- is all inclusive, and ties into Microsoft online services. We still hope that Microsoft eventually bites the bullet and releases an RIA version of Office that exists in the cloud, but Albany is a smart consumer offering in the meantime that may stem the flow of users jumping ship for free online alternatives by making things easier, more tightly integrated to the online Live product family, and potentially cheaper.

In September of 2006, Reuters reported that Microsoft was considering releasing an online version of Works to preempt the then unreleased Google Docs and Spreadsheets Internet application. A year later, in August 2007, a rumor surfaced that Works was going free and ad-supported in an attempt to compete with Google, but would still be a desktop application. Neither rumor panned out. Works remains a for-pay, desktop application that doesn't appear to have anything to do with Microsoft's web office strategy.

Like the previous rumors before it, evidence is now mounting that Albany too is not related to Works. So what is Albany? Mary-Jo Foley reported this morning that it is apparently going to be a so-called "ValueBox" offering that bundles three Microsoft Office components. According to one source, Albany will bring together Windows Live OneCare, Office Live Workspace, and Office Home and Student Edition.

The term "ValueBox," which was taken from a screenshot of the Albany beta sign up page that Foley got her hands on, seems to indicate that the Albany bundle might be offered at a discount, which in turn points to this being part of Microsoft's attempt to draw users away from the freely offered Google Docs online office suite. As Foley points out, Microsoft might be smart to target students, who have been one of their biggest user bases for Office Live Workspace, and whose generally tight budgets make Google's free offering especially attractive. (Google Docs is so far not generally considered ready for the enterprise.)

But will it work? We published a head-to-head feature comparison of Google Docs and Office Live Workspace earlier this month and found that both services have a very similar feature set. The main difference, though, is that Google Docs is a web application, which means that it 1. doesn't require desktop software to be installed, and 2. allows for things like real-time online collaboration. Those are two very alluring features. Plus, I'm not convinced that Microsoft could offer enough value in its "ValueBox" to really attract students. Many schools offer Office Home and Student at such a deeply discounted rate (for example, my girlfriend -- who is a student -- recently purchased a copy from her university's bookstore for about $10), that it seems unlikely that Microsoft would discount the bundle far enough to compete with current student pricing.