@Captain Save-a-ho
Are you retarded or just have reading skills even worse than your writing ones?
(it's "bane", not "bain" -- doesn't your browser show you the misspellings as you type, or are you just too thick to understand what the wiggly red underline means?) Gee, between you and Micky 1 here I don't know who the MS employee of the month will be, seriously...
Can't you read what people said? Can't you understand text? People are complaining about the practice of charging for software that CAN NOT be used in order to use another, not the fact that MS is changing for something at all. Obviously anyone is free to not buy it if they don't like the license. But that's the *anti-competitive point* of the whole thing. You know, lots of people run Oracle on Linux, and last time I checked it wasn't for free, or even cheap.
See, I will write, slowly for you, a little boring bedtime story to scare MS chills at night: some business bods are thinking of running Linux (or whatever) on their new computers, but are forced to run MS Office (because the world sucks like that). So they can't. All of a sudden, MS releases a web-based version of MS Office, and that will run on any system, yay! (I'm hypothesizing here, maybe it does not run). Now business bods are happy that they can install any OS they want, and can stop using their Windows 2000 Frankenthing that's been deteriorating over the years and demands a re-install every year. MS can't have that, can they? What next, people will start selling computers with other OSes installed, since now Office runs in any of them and there's little reason to run Windows? (assuming they don't also need other non-Linux friendly software, of course) Can't stand even the hypothetical possibility, can we?
So lo-and-behold, MS says that you have to pay the full price of the standalone desktop MS Office to run something that does not depend on it at all. So, think our hypothetical business bods, what's the point of buying the license for the web thingy? Might just as well keep using the old system and being able to run both the stand-alone and the web versions.
I know you did not get a word of what I wrote (by nature or by choice), but I did it anyway just in case someone else who is not an MS chill reads it and wants to understand other people's points.