Office 2007 Professional Microsoft adds Groupon-st

Microsoft has rolled out a new incentive to appeal to and maintain even more Bing customers: Group deals.
On March three, Microsoft launched “Bing deals” for the desktop and mobile (m.bing.com) via a partnership with The Dealmap. Via the partnership, Bing people in the U.S. will get access to “even more than 200,Microsoft Office Professional 2010,000 unique offers you in over 14,000 cities and towns,Office 2010 Professional,” according to Microsoft. The Dealmap aggregates group deals from sources including Groupon, Living Social and Restaurant.com, among other sites.
Update: For now,Office 2007 Professional, on the mobile front, Bing deals are for iPhone and Android phones only, as reader @thedavidk pointed out. Microsoft’s official statement: “The (deals) functionality is based on HTML5 and will work with phones that support it, but today is being released for iOS and Android. Windows Phone 7 announced that they will have HTML5 support in an update later this calendar year, at which point deals will work great on Windows Phone.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said, when I asked about wider availability: “Offers are currently available in the U.S. only. We’re working to expand support to much more markets,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, and will announce additional locations as they become available.”
Microsoft has used a variety of financial promotions to entice users to try Bing over the years. Last year, the company discontinued its Bing Cashback program — via which the company paid consumers to use its Bing search engine to shop — claiming the program never really took hold.
More recently,Windows 7, Microsoft had better success by giving away virtual Farmville cash to get end users to try Bing (or at least follow Bing on Facebook…).
There’s one rather odd complication to the Microsoft-Dealmap partnership called out by Silicon Alley Insider’s Matt Rosoff:
“The Dealmap uses Google Maps to display its maps today. The Bing deal won’t change that. But the CTO of Dealmap’s parent company Center’d is Chandu Thota, who previously led development for Bing Maps, so the company is very familiar with how Microsoft’s mapping service works and could be making a switch in the future.”