Putting the Screws to Redmond

Uh-oh:

Today Google made Quickoffice—its app for creating and editing Microsoft Office documents—free to all users of iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Quickoffice was bought by Google a year ago, and it has provided editing of Microsoft Office documents in their native formats on mobile devices for more than a couple of years. The app cost $20, but Google made it free to companies that are paying subscribers of Google Apps for Business. With today’s update, it’s free to everyone with a Google account, whether you pay for a Google Apps subscription or not.

You can make loads of money selling slick hardware combined with slick software at a not-so-decent price. You can also make loads of money selling slick ads via slick services on decent hardware.

What’s becoming more and more difficult to do is to make loads of money selling decent software to run on somebody else’s hardware, when everybody else is giving their software away.