Microsoft Drops Office Starter Edition

[Brink]

Microsoft is dumping its Office Starter edition as Windows 8 and the next edition of the suite, dubbed Office 2013, near completion and release later this year and early next.

The company blamed a "bad user experience" in Windows 8 for the move.

ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley first reported on the demise of Office Starter 2010 earlier on Thursday.

Office Starter 2010, which Microsoft created in 2009, was the company's replacement for Microsoft Works, an entry-level application suite that had been offered to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) for bundling with new PCs.

Read more at:
Microsoft Drops Office Starter Edition | PCWorld

 

[Dave76]

Another push to the clouds.

Microsoft would push Office Web Apps -- the free online editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that rely on a scaled-back subset of the desktop versions' features -- as the replacement for Office Starter 2010.

 

[pparks1]

Unless you don't have Internet access, this makes sense to me. But I'm also one who likes to keep my machines as clean as possible, so I particularly enjoy the fact that I can occasionally use Office apps without actually having to install them.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

As a businessman over the last umpteen years I can't for one second think of not having the full MS Office suite installed. True I like to skip a generation or two but it truly has become an essential not a luxury.

 

[pparks1]

^ Huh, I've been an IT grunt/admin for the past 15 years and I find that for home use, my needs for MS Office are rather small. I've been able to survive for the past 5 on either Open Office or Google Docs with very few issues. The only component I regularly make use of is the spreadsheet...and most of these 3rd party offshoots easily do the basics..which is all that I need. I cannot justify the cost of MS office on my home computer at all. Guess it's true, we are all different.

 

[FuturDreamz]

I just use LibreOffice. It handles formatting slightly different than regular Office, but it does the job.