Subscription MS Office suite has a name and a low price

The Office suite formerly known as Albany now has an official name, "Equipt" and a new low price, an annual

subscription fee of $69.99 per year. Equipt is geared for the home/student and includes Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live OneCare, Office Live Workspaces, Windows Live Mail, Live Messenger and Live Photo. A story from IDG News Service reports that Microsoft plans to begin selling it in the U.S. on July 15 through Circuit City, with other outlets to follow. It will be offered in other countries at about the same time, though pricing elsewhere was not announced.

We'll see if Equipt can save Office in this market. The price is right, sort of. A student using it for four years will be shelling out about $240. Meanwhile students have been fleeing to open source office suites because the price is even better (free) and these suites offer enough compatibility with Microsoft Office for their needs. In the meantime, most of the other components in the suite also compete with freebie offerings: document sharing, instant messaging, e-mail, photo editing.

Go to the Microsoft Subnet home page for more news, blogs, podcasts. Open source could doom Exchange, one IT pro believes Microsoft rolls out new IBM HPC serversMicrosoft releases OOXML-to-HTML translator Good-bye XP, desktop virtualization is the answerAll hail Hyper-V: the hypervisor finally, officially arrivesDozens of great freebie addons for OpsMgr 2007

More Microsoft Subnet blog posts: