Riposte - Microsoft to release free web-based version of Office

And now we see the reply. Truth: I've known this was coming for a while, so long that I thought they had given up on it (vaporware, who'd have thunk it...). But it's a good way to hit back at Google. You give away a free OS and leverage your web-based tools to get there? Okay, we'll give away a web-based version of our industry-leading tools in return.

Unlike Google's OS I can see the incentive here. If you're a company of any size you probably won't want to run your entire business off web-based tools. Instead you'll want desktop versions of Office. But your employees might work from home, etc., and you'll want to have them have access to the same kinds of tools that they use at work. So you don't cannibalize yourself by doing this. The only sales you "cannibalize" are the people using pirated versions who now can just use your free version, but that's not a sale you're costing yourself.