Microsoft Giving Away Accounting Software

Wow.  Well here's one way to try and get people to adopt your software.  Give it away.  Microsoft has released an edition of it's 2007 Office Accounting software called Express for free.  Get it at http://www.ideawins.com/index.html.  That's definitely one way to try and get it to the masses.

I look forward to using the 2007 Professional edition as we moved to the 2006 edition about 4 months ago.  Overall I have to say that I enjoy using it.  It is definitely different than Quickbooks and the flow is a little different.  But the satisfaction of having that database reside on the server and be backed up on a consistent basis is pretty nice.

Also there is some new items with the new 2007 edition:

Grow your business online

• List items on eBay, track sales activity, and download and process orders
• Email invoices and get paid faster with PayPal
• Monitor your customers’ business credit in real-time through Equifax

I think the above is pretty big.  Online for the micro and small businesses will continue to get pretty big.  Also being able to share your books with your accountant through Office Live is pretty interesting as well.  Although I see 2 problems with this.  1.  I don't know too many people that would yet be willing to share their financial data over the Internet and 2.  Accountants haven't exactly embraced Office Accounting as of yet.  That's a big deal.  If the accountants start to use it then we'll see a shift in the tide of accounting packages for the SMB.