Competing with free online office software is no friendly challenge for Microsoft. Their long time bread and butter, Microsoft Office, has been assaulted by new competitors such as Google's free application suite "Google Docs" and the popular open source suite: Open Office, as well as other products operating as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Now Microsoft seeks to rebuild its business model by launching an ad supported version Office online.
"An ad-supported version of the Office suite is coming...We've shown lightweight versions of Excel and Word for the cloud," similar to Google, Microsoft executive Stephen Elop explained in a conference in San Francisco.