Outlook Subscription Service: Will Folks Bite?: "We've been confused about 'Microsoft Office Outlook Live' since word first leaked about it last year. Now that the subscription service has been announced, we're even more confused. Who is the audience for this? Are there really a lot of Hotmail power users who don't already own Office and who would be willing to pay $59.95 a year in order to use Outlook 2003's to manage their messages, contacts and calendars? Why not just use the MSN Outlook Connector that's part of MSN Premium? Microsoft says this is first (of what one would assume will be several) Office-based subscription services. Perhaps the next will make more sense (to us, at least)." Ooops I quoted the whole article. Exactly my thoughts though. I'm expecting any time now to see some signs of desparation on the part of Microsoft. Sure they can salvage a contract here or there by practically giving the product away, and they can even shuffle the numbers around to make everything look solid for a while. Having the CFO leave makes you wonder whether all that can be legally done along those lines is in the past though. They need something though, whether it's the Xbox or those stupid notepad things to zoom into the stratosphere of ubiquity, and so far, nothing has. Having to give away so much Hotmail disk space can't have helped mattters. Having an online subscription version of Office actually makes a lot of sense, but of course, as soon as MS admits this, they will have competitors doing it better and cheaper. Not clear that they will have an unfair advantage that they seem to need in order to make such a move.