Microsoft Armed and Equipt

With Equipt, you pay a yearly fee for access to the code - $70 for not one but three sets of the full line of products. And those services are delivered and administered in a mixed online and desktop environment.

In other words, you don't buy Microsoft products, you rent them.

"It's all about an incremental strategy of getting the right product at the right price in the right person's hand through the right retail channel," says Bryson Gordon, group product manager for Equipt at Microsoft. "Subscription-based products let us get super-targeted about what we can offer."

I have been testing Equipt in my digital world recently and, I must say, the company has taken very big steps here: Equipt is very interesting for small businesses.

First, the installation is very un-Microsoft-like. No multiple discs or interminable upgrades or 45 minutes in front of the PC to get it work: Equipt comes as a single disc that takes all of 10 minutes to begin installation. The actual installation -- that is, downloading and configuring the software -- still takes the Microsoftian standard hour, but on a fast computer and decent Web connection, that process can take place in the background. So you can keep working while Equipt does its installation thing, though you will notice some processing drag and slow speeds during the process.

Once set up, Equipt prompts you to create an online account. Here, Microsoft gets points for playing nice in the identity sandbox. You can use any e-mail account, Microsoft Hotmail or not. But be careful. If you have several Microsoft IDs, or identities, you could find, like I did, that your identity gets corrupted - which takes some brown-belt-level gadget jujitsu to get things working as they should.