MS SaaS Trial

Microsoft is trialling a software as a service model for home users. The Albany trial bundles Office Home and Student, Windows Live Onecare, collaboration software Office Live Workspace and three of its Windows Live web services, according to the writeup in ZDNet.

But blog Valleywag has heaped scorn on the offering, saying it’s an attempt to get people to pay a monthly fee for software that mostly they already have or can access for free or via subscription already.

Here’s the bit that annoyed me (from the ZDNet story):

“If and when Albany users cut their subscriptions, they won’t lose their
data, said Gordon. They will be able to go out and buy a copy of Office
and still access their documents and data, he said.”

Uh, actually, ‘you’ll need to go buy a copy of our software to access your data’ sounds a lot like lock-in to me. Why pretend otherwise?