Office 2010 Launches Tuesday but will Office Web Apps & Office Starter hurt sales?

Yesterday Microsoft Launched it's Official Office 2010 line to the public with three versions, Office Home and Student retail $149, Home and Office retail $279 and Office Professional 2010 retail $499 all which had a mediocre response to store sales and it leads you to wonder, with all the FREE alternatives out there right now such as Open Office or Google Docs has the general population lost interest in purchasing NEW Office Document Software?

Microsoft has even acknoledged that they have taken a beating from these new applications and have countered by offering new programs like Office Starter, (Ad Supported pre-packed software) to replace MS Works and Office Web Apps online for Free. With these FREE alternatives convincing consumers that there is the need to upgrade their current Office platform may be an uhill challenge. Microsoft has already allocated millions of dollars in advertising to help boost what they knew were going to be sluggish sales and Amazon has already started slashing prices by around 13% to try and intise buyers to make the move to the new 2010 platform. It seems to me that the general population isn't exactly jumping up and down on what Microsoft was hoping to be the next great product to come out of the assembly line in Redmond as they saw with Windows 7.

Open Source

Has Open Source Software found it's niche into the general population? It seems as though more and more people are realizing and accepting the features of these available software companies and learning that production is something that doesn't always have to come in a pre-packaged box from Redmond. For years open source software has been preached from a community of developers and coders trying to break the operating system trend. They have been working hard to offer alternatives to the general population but have had a really tough time cracking the grip that Microsoft has held. If Sales stay the same it may be safe to say that the Alternative are here to stay!