Gadget To Day: Re: [macsupport] Re: Microsoft Office is now free!

As a loyal Windows and Office purchaser since 1.0 I am not a freeloader. Just letting list know it is FREEMIUM not Free, so if they see competing FREE software (of which there are many in the Cloud Office space) they know they are not comparing Apples and Oranges.

But I expect FreeWare, Jr, Software, Limited Feature or Freemium to be labelled correctly by a big company like MS - surely they have lawyers who should be tolling them misrepresentation is risky with pockets as deep as theirs.

And I expected the Office 365 I paid for to be fully internationalized being bilingual like my children. I did not expect to have to pay more to type text into my Office 365. Particularly since the Japanese IME is built into Window and works with Wordpad, Google Docs, Zoho, etc. its an example of me paying fro software worse than the FREE equivalents. And not even good warnings - I had to Google to see why Japanese input was broken in my paid Office 365 - no error messages or warning when I tried to use it in Office 365.

Calling me a complainer because I want something for FREE is not fair - or that MS is mislabeling FREEMIUM stuff as FREE - gaining the prestige without the goods to back it up.

There are companies that offer FREE software subsidized by their paid software, and MS has plenty of budget to do that. They paid several billion for Skype and it is FREE and labelled as such. And is hardly crippled. One only pays to contact landlines. No features are missing - I can type non-English languages in the chat, etc. so they know how to offer TRULY FREE STUFF AND DO.

On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Andrew Buc abuc@andrewbuc.com [macsupportcentral] <macsupportcentral@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

On Nov 8, 2014, at 5:06 PM, 'Randy B. Singer' randy@macattorney.com
[macsupportcentral] wrote:

> It's interesting how, when you give someone in this country a free
> Toyota Corolla, they complain that they didn't get a free Lexus.

I'm reminded of a comment a few years ago on the forums at Where's
George, the currency tracking website. It's possible to use WG
entirely free, but you get extra goodies if you send money to support
the site. (The goody that means the most to me personally is the
ability to see the exact zip code, not just the city and state, where
someone hit my bill.) Anyway, someone was complaining that the
particular goody s/he wanted was available only to supporters.
Someone else said, "If someone gives you a free cookie, don't
complain that you didn't get two." Same principle.