from Associated Press: Microsoft Corp. will begin selling its Outlook e-mail program as a subscription to Hotmail customers, in a bid to persuade people to pay for add-on services and better compete with rivals such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
The new service, which costs $59.95 per year, will let people organize e-mail, contact lists and calendars in their online Hotmail accounts using the Microsoft Outlook program most often found on businesses’ desktop computers.
Ted Schadler, principal analyst with Forrester Research, said Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is smart to take advantage of a popular core product–Outlook–to help make Hotmail more attractive to sophisticated users. But he noted that there are many free programs that do similar things, and questioned whether the price will be too high to garner much interest.
“That feels pretty steep to me,” he said.
Microsoft’s Web site sells Outlook as a standalone product for $109. This is the first time Microsoft has offered any of its Office products on a subscription basis.
