on mini-laptops due to be arrive in Asian stores later this month. Coloma declined to reveal how much the Japanese firm is paying. (A regular ThinkFree license is $49.95.)

And ThinkFree has gotten "a lot of inquiries from Netbook vendors" such as Acer, which was asking for a smaller-footprint office suite a year ago, Coloma said.

The question is, has ThinkFree, rather than arriving too early as it has in the past, arrived too late?

"Nobody *needs* ThinkFree, because there are already plenty of alternatives," Linder wrote in an e-mail.

Coloma disagreed. He pointed to the software's flexibility -- it runs on , Windows Vista, Linux and Mac OS X, as well as on Netbooks using either x86 Intel processors or ARM ones. He also claimed that ThinkFree Netbook doesn't sacrifice any of the full version's major components -- it has a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation creator -- nor features, such as the ability to open and save files in all Microsoft Office formats, including Office 2007's OOXML formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx).