Is Microsoft starting to get concerned about their lack of an online productivity suite? Arstechnica believes that they’re feeling the pressure and says that Microsoft is looking to take Microsoft Works online to provide a free alternative to a word processor.
If they do decide to go through with their idea it will have to be ad-supported, and depending on the functionality of their offering it may be worth having the ads. However, if it is similar to Zoho’s Writer or Google’s Writely then it probably won’t take off very well.
I do know several people who refuse to use Microsoft Works because they do not find it to be productive at all. There are several other free solutions that people should look for before they start using Microsoft Works. Almost everyone that uses Microsoft Works only use it because that’s what was included with their PC. If they knew about the powerful OpenOffice.org, which is free, then most people would probably begin to wonder how they ever used Microsoft Works. 
Even though Microsoft Works isn’t the greatest productivity suite that is available it would still be pretty impressive if Microsoft could bring almost all of the Microsoft Works features into a web-based version. They would probably have to do that similarly to how they let users try out Office 2007 without installing it on their system. I doubt they will take that route though because it seems like it is very high-bandwidth.
I never actually tried Microsoft Works. The program that came with my laptop, and later my PC was Wordperfect. That program was truly bad. That’s why I use OpenOffice.org now and MS Office 2007 (for now).
I will definitely give this product a try if it does make it to the web. It would probably require an ActiveX control though so no Firefox user would be able to play with it.
I used MS Works (ain’t that an oxymoron?) a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…Okay, make that early 90′s back when it ran on…DOS! (okay for you people that are too young to know about DOS look it up on Wikipedia)! It’s time back then it was a nice program and not the space/resource hog that Office is. HOWEVER, today’s versions are worth it considering you can use OpenOffice which does everything Works does much better (mainly it is not Microsoft application).
DOS? Isn’t that the Denial-Of-Service operating system?
Hey now, it was/is a heck of a lot more stable than windoze.
I know, I have always wondered why Microsoft stopped developing that because look at how popular Unix still is.
They stopped developing it because the large PC-dumb home and business market wouldn’t buy it off them
I’ve never seen the point of Works – it’s like a crap version of Office to put on cheap new PCs or schools or stuff like that. If you want cheap, get Open Office, if you want an online one then go to Google.
I have always wondered why people would use Works over OpenOffice. I think that it is just a lack of publicity and maybe Google needs to team up with them like they did with Mozilla.
Well, before OpenOffice it was a ‘cheap’ alternative to MS Office, but now with broadband so widely available people can easily get OpenOffice.