What if instead of paying alot of money for Microsoft Word – you simply paid a small fee to create a Word Document?
Microsoft is and has been in a battle to preserve their revenues from Microsoft Office while combating free services like Google Docs. Having been testing Google Docs and EverNote recently the following thought occurred to me.
The core features of MS Word that I need on a very infrequent basis is the Table of Contents, cross referencing and styles for when I am producing a very long proposal. Otherwise I don’t need the power house that is MS Word. A simple richt text document with font formatting and bulleting will suffice for the overwhelming majority of the documents that I write.
Unfortunately I have to pay the hefty price for the entire office suite. Well, what if Microsoft made a version of the .docx (or .doc) file that was both the Editor (to write the document) and the viewer (to view the document) and then allowed me to purchase the right to produce individual .docx documents? I may even purchase them in bulk and save some money. I am no longer paying for the program to create an unlimited number of documents but for the right to create a limited number of documents in the volume that I need. A user-name and password of sorts configured during the purchase process would allow me to edit the document – while default access would only allow viewing.
In this new model I would then be free to purchase only the number of .docx files that I need to do my job and not any more. I would also have the freedom to edit my documents on any computer as the lightweight editor is bundled into the file itself.
What do you think? Is this idea worth further consideration?
