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Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

Google Docs have always been free, three weeks ago Apple's iWork suite went free, and now Office for mobile is free. Competition is a wonderful thing - hopefully it starts to bring down the price of Microsoft's cash cow, Office.

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I'm just worried that we're going to start paying for those suites with our confidental document data instead of money... with no alternative choice.

That's how people pay for Google Docs and all of Google's products and they seem to be perfectly OK with it. As long as the perceived price is $0 they're happy and don't really care what the real price is for things. Ignorance truly is bliss.

I don't mind other people using that, but I'd rather have at least a single mobile/desktop office suite available that does not send everything to US -_-

LibreOffice comes in mind for that one.

But not everyone uses Google Docs, and not every user trusts it with important or confidential data.

A lot of people/companies/governments are not okay with it, and do not use it.

LibreOffice is at least a serviceable alternative.

It can't overcome the "I need MS Office" problem, and it might not be feature equivalent for layout, but for 90% of stuff that is just some text, it should be fine.

If you're worried don't use the software.

A wonderful thing for end users. A shitty thing for people who actually believe they can have a career building software that sells.

From what I can tell, iWork isn't free unless you buy new hardware, and that deal has been around for a year now.

They changed it with the release of Yosemite. It's now free for anyone with iOS8 or OSX 10.10

I don't think so. I have an older MacBook Pro, and I'm running the latest OS X (and iOS). Comes up as 20$ each for Keynote / Numbers / Pages on OS X, 10$ each on iOS.

Nope. You need to purchase new (late 2013 or newer) hardware to get it.

iWork only runs on Apple's hw, but I didn't think you needed to buy _new_ hw. I believe you only need to update to Mavericks (or Yosemite).

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