Tim Hickernell, associate lead analyst at Info-Tech Research Group Inc., anticipates Microsoft will continue to offer special deals to government entities that resemble enterprise buy-outs. But he doesn't expect the trend to spread outside the public sector. "We do not see a tremendous push towards adopting these tools in the market in general," he said.

The public sector is extremely competitive right now, Hickernell pointed out.

"You've got alternative office providers as well as Google out there really putting pressure in the public sector on Microsoft to cut better deals. We've already seen Microsoft offer, literally in some cases, their online services for basic e-mail and document collaboration basically for free and heavily discounted to academic organizations," he said.

But having an all-you-can-drink model doesn't necessarily mean that government should give everything to every desktop, Hickernell warned. "Adopting the build-and-they-will-come mentality is very dangerous whether you are public sector or private sector," he said.

"They are still going to have to do their work in defining end user roles and who needs what tools because you could really just create more harm than good by saying well it's all free, let's just roll every desktop tool out to every single user," said Hickernell.