Microsoft Live: Money For Nothing, Sites For Free?

This isn’t a new announcement, but to some of you it may be. CNBC TV had a clip earlier about Microsoft’s new offering, due Nov 15th or so. They’ll be offering their Microsoft Office Live, which will be essentially their Office suite of applications, but running in a web browser. I’m assuming that they’ll be similar to Google Docs and Spreadsheets (formerly Writely) and Zoho’s web apps. What’s more, you’ll be to register your own domain name and have tools with which to build your own website. The best part? It’ll all be free, in return for the cost of your eyeballs having to see advertising - potentially similar to the Google AdSense text ads. That’s right; you’ll be able to register your own domain name for free, and keep it for life. (But I’m holdng out for Scrybe.)

Breaking news: Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is planning to anounce a partnership later today with former rival Novell which will allow Linux open source applications to run on Windows. Wow. CNBC TV thinks that’ll be bad news for Linux OS market leader RedHat. As a Unix user since the early 1980s and a Linux user since the mid-1990s, I’m all for interoperability. Bravo.