Yes, there will be a free version of Office 14 but it’s not what you think. Not unless you understand the revenue potential of advertising, that is.

At a presentation to analysts at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference on 3rd March, Microsoft Business Division Chief Stephen Elop announced that

There will be ad-based revenue streams. There’s an opportunity to draw those pirate customers into the revenue stream. We want to draw them into the Windows family and maybe there’s an upsell opportunity later.

In this move, Microsoft have adopted a very clear stance against software piracy. As expected, Elop did not use the conference as an opportunity to give us further insight into the scheduled release date for Office 14.

Hacked Offic 14

Maybe I’m missing something here. Wouldn’t hackers be able to hack the software and the ad server? I’m guessing that they might be able to either disable the serving of ads altogether, or at least present their own ads so that they take the revenue and not Microsoft. And I imagine that the second option is the more appealing one. To me, this sounds like a very powerful incentive for dubious individuals to crack Office 14!

Imagine distributing thousands of copies of cracked Office 14 that were serving your adverts and not Microsoft’s. I have a feeling that instead of being a deterrent, this potential revenue stream will draw more budding young hackers to the challenge!

But, I’ve not read any detailed plans for implementing this measure, and I’m no hacker myself, so I don’t know how easy it would be to hijack those ads. I bet we find out soon though.

The Rumour Mill

I’ve read some public concerns about the privacy of content if ads that are served are contextual (and they ought to be if advertisers are to get decent click throughs). The concern is that for Microsoft to serve up ads that are related to the content of a Word document, say, they need access to its contents and therefore privacy is breached. I’m not sure this really is a problem though. If you have a Gmail account, for example, you will no doubt have seen the contextual advertising that appears to the right of the content of each email you receive. The fact that Google automatically match adverts to keywords in content doesn’t imply that Google staff are poring over your emails.

Tags | ad revenue stream, anti piracy measure, cracked Office 14