Online Services Pioneer New Licensing Model

Although Microsoft has talked about “software as a service” for many years, early consumer-oriented efforts were unsuccessful, and conventional software licensing still dominates the company’s business offerings. However, the shift to Web services and service-oriented software architectures presents a challenge to that model: a business service may operate invisibly to end users, and may require no installation of special software on their computers. Microsoft is now refining a new licensing model for online business services and has rolled that model out for four services. If it proves successful, business customers may see it in more products in the future.

So far the company has announced volume licensing for the following online services:

• Office Live Meeting, an online conferencing service
• The MapPoint Web Service, used by corporations or ISVs to create applications that map routes to a destination or to locate particular addresses on a map
• Microsoft Business Network (MBN), which