LOL.
That is one of the ways MS keeps their monopoly.
Not surprised you approve of it.
Interesting those kids will be exposed almost constantly to the barrage of exhortations to MS online services, using their dominance to give Bing an uncompetitive advantage, ads, etc.
Lovely.
the software support for Office won't be there
As it shouldn't be. If it was, it would have a devastating effect on any attempt at competition, or a free market.
You believe in a free market don't you Cokie?
Not only I approve of it, it bloody well works! I believe in a free market, but as it is, pretty much no one is competing against Microsoft well enough to be considered an alternative. All there is are freeware that I can vouch for a fact can't float in the education when students have been taught Office already. There are cloud services like google docs, but even that can't float well enough most of the time, it's too simple and when you need advanced things; it's not there.
And you don't seem to see the flipside, if google were to invade on Microsoft's territory, that would be a monopoly as well. In fact, that's what google is doing, becoming the "new" Microsoft as they were 15 years ago. Just because Microsoft is predominantly used in the enterprise and education doesn't mean it's a monopoly, but what else is there? Not much. Why? Not many are competing against them on a dollar based level. Why? I can't say. Should there be? Yes. That's how things innovate and develop.
Even then, an x86 tablet PC can be easily switched to a google online monopoly, google docs, youtube, google search, chrome, and so on and so forth.
This is why you can't underestimate Microsoft, they knew how to create territory many many years ago: they licensed Windows, focused on the enterprise, then as an indirect result, trickled down to the consumer as that's what they were already using at work and school. That's what apple is trying to do with the ipad, get it into education and extort students and schools of hundreds of thousands of markups because of a bitten out of apple logo. Lastly, Microsoft was actually developing Office for android and ios but that seems to have crashed and burned. Why? They started some crap with google and their paid adverts, in which google responded with cutting out google services and support from Windows Phone like google docs and calendars as well as youtube; after saying they're cutting out some of Microsoft's services from gmail I think it was. So that's not happening due to company competition. Then there's apple and the ipad, there were legit screenshots of Office mobile being developed for it, but apple got greedy and demanded a 30 percent cut of SkyDrive storage upgrades. Which I find stupid as taking a 30 percent cut from a free app of something that you don't even purchase in-app, you do it on Outlook.com in browser. So apple's not relenting on that, and Microsoft doesn't want to either. So that's not going to happen.
Office is basically the leverage for using Windows and Windows Phone, it's the best, most used, and has little alternative. Not that it's a monopoly, there isn't competition that can really be an alternative to it that I've mentioned already. That's the way it is.