Microsoft will make Works available free with an ad-supported model. This is interesting to me, I think it is smart but I think they would be better off just giving it away for free without ads. Giving it away ad-supported isn’t a bad idea, it will probably keep people away from using wordpad which for a lot of the people that I have met in high school was the word processor of choice (not exactly, they couldn’t pay for office and didn’t know of any alternatives).
This will help fight off some of the competition that they are getting from online options such as Google docs. I don’t know what they will do with Works, whether or not it will end up being bundled for free with future versions of Windows or if it will be a download on their website.
I personally think that Works is useless and if you need a cheap/free office suite just download OpenOffice or NeoOffice.
I think ALL of them should be free.