Microsoft to Charge for Office Beta

theodp writes "Beginning next Wednesday, those who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman." From the article: "Although Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group decided to initiate a fee for new users of Beta 2, the "technical refresh," or update, for current users of the software will remain free, the spokeswoman said. Those who want to test drive Beta 2 to review how it works can access the software for free. But if they need to test it against their internal systems, a download or the CD is required. "

Comments

How is any different?

[grolschie]

All MS products are really just betas that are tested on end users. By the time that they are reasonably robust, they drop support for them. :-)

Re:How is any different?

[grammar fascist]

All MS products are really just betas that are tested on end users.

Maybe this is why they're charging - so they actually get something from the people who would download the beta and keep using it rather than buying the full version, or dissuade them from downloading the beta at all.

They must be assuming those people are pretty cheap. They might be right.

Re:How is any different?

[LiquidCoooled]

My boss has a theory about free software (of any type, OSS/pirated/beta/given away).
He says that if you pirate software (or otherwise get it free) then you have no vested interest in making sure it works for you. If you come across a problem with something you paid nothing for, you are less likely to try very hard to get it resolved.
However, once you have paid for something the mindset becomes "why isn't my program working".

Don't know if this is the case with microsoft, but it kindof makes sense.

Re:How is any different?

[Bender_]

That is opposed to the continuous alpha testing that all users of open source software do?

Re:How is any different?

[marcello_dl]

That is opposed to the continuous alpha testing that all users of open source software do?

It's worse.
Simply because alpha quality OSS is not tested by ALL OSS users as you state. For example in Debian only the experimental branch might be tagged "alpha", people using any other branch, the majority, have mature beta to production quality stuff. Oh and for the "having to pay" thing too.

Re:How is any different?

[Zemran]

All MS products are really just betas that are tested on end users.

Fair comment, and I would happily pay the same for the latest beta as I am prepared to pay for the final product... but I think that 1.50 is a bit much to ask people. In fact when they bring out a Linux version I will be able to make a choice to not buy it (I will not hold my breath).

Re:How is any different?

[NickFortune]

All MS products are really just betas that are tested on end users

I'm just happy that they've finally settled on a realistic price point for office.

Re:How is any different?

[QuietLagoon]

so they actually get something from the people who would download the beta and keep using it rather than buying the full version,

Isn't there a timeout on the beta version, so they stop working after a few months?

Re:How is any different?

[Anonymous Coward]

To date, there has been no problem finding bugs in Microsoft's software.

I think their marketing people have realized yet-another-new-version-of-office is not that interesting to people. So, they are doing whatever they can to plant the idea in people's minds that something with no margin value (if you already have office, why upgrade?) should be considered valuable anyways.*

Microsoft is playing a game of smoke and mirrors.

* The real reason -- they want people using their new file format as much as possible. By making the beta cost money, people who download it are less likely to ever throw it away.

Re:How is any different?

[Frightening]

Not really. To do anything worthwile with OSS software, you will have to understand what is happening, and the time it will take you to learn that is an investment. The mindset becomes: "Why is our software not working?".

P.S I'm not a commie.

Re:How is any different?

[lcohiomatty86]

of course it makes sense... if something is free to you.. why does it matter much if something happens and it doesnt work? but once you plunk down $100 for something and it doesnt work you'll get quite upset as you had to work hard for that money used to purchase the item and you sure as heck expected it to work correctly.

Re: How is any different?

[cswiger2005]

"All users"? Really?

Last time I checked, nothing is requiring people to use Open Source software at all, much less OSS which is in alpha. If you choose to use OSS, that's exactly what's going on-- your choice-- and it's obviously possible to use production-quality OSS like Apache or Firefox/T'bird. Just what do you think Slashdot runs on, hmm?

Re:How is any different?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about that. I haven't paid for windows in years yet I still get pissed at it when it crashes.

Re:How is any different?

[gnuman99]

Bull.

I have a game, let's call it Black & White 2, that works on Athlon XP 2000 with 512MB ram and nVidia FX series video card. Great! Now, move it to Athlon 64 X2 4400 with 2GB and 7900GT video card and it craps out. It doesn't even start! What did I do with it? Nothing. Uninstalled it. And yes, I payed $50 for it and it is about the same as the first one...

Now, I recently upgraded linux to 2.6.17 SMP from 2.6.16 UP (uni-processor) kernel. Well, all hell broke loose with system calls. Suddenly, select(...) calls used up CPU time! It took hours to trace the problem to ACPI. Turning that off, I finanally can use the 2.6.17 SMP kernel (Debian removed the UP kernel in favour of SMP with 2.6.17... Not sure why yet).

Now, if you pirate software, well, just DO NOT compare it to free software (as in OSS, not "for free"). They are not the same. And no, unless you write the software it is *never* "your" program. You just have a license to use it. Nothing more. And without a license, you can't use it.

The bottom line is, I need linux to work. I don't care if Black & White 2 works now because I don't need it. The amount of money paid for the license is secondary.

Re:How is any different?

[LiquidCoooled]

The simple answer is that you and I are not ordinary users.

We both know that you wouldn't even hear about the SMP problem from a normal person, they would tell you its not working and follow the brief description with "but it works fine in Windows", and thats the rare percentage that would even install linux.

If you are the sysadmin of a company with linux machines, its your job to make sure its working and you would be the one receiving the phone calls or error mails telling you its not, there is no personal money on your part to lose and you are the end of the line as far as local user support goes.

As for your gaming issues, if you have installed it on a compatible system (ie, not the 64bit version of Windows) then you are entitled to support for a product you have purchased, its your personal choice to decide not to follow it up.
If the situation were similar with myself and the half life 2 engine, I would be contacting Valve and attempting to find out whats up with it.

I have found that people who pirate software are usually easy come easy go and the same comes from trying all sorts of legit open/closed source programs, if it doesn't do exactly what you want, you uninstall and move onto the next one.

Re:How is any different?

[arashi no garou]

Your boss is quite the philosopher, but he's a bit off. I never paid for The Gimp, but since I cannot afford Photoshop and I don't want to pirate it, I overcame the learning curve and am now more productive in The Gimp than I ever was in Photoshop back in college. When someone hands me a tool for free, and I have to relearn some of the ways of using said tool to get the same job done, I'm going to consider the learning curve to be the price paid.

But that's just me.

Re:How is any different?

[LiquidCoooled]

You aren't the only one, but theres a great many people who haven't got the time to invest.
I worked very happily with Internet Explorer for years until one day gmail wouldn't run in it.
I did all I could within reason at my end to fix it, but nothing I tried would work.
So I went out and downloaded this free browser (some alpha/beta of firefox 1.0) and it worked almost perfectly.

Some of the sites this computer visits don't work properly but that was easily handled (my missus uses MSN groups, she now opens my computer and uses it from there).
I had to learn how to do all the old things I did and rework my system installation plans (I keep backups of every installed program/device driver/codec I use) and I found the experience very rewarding.
When I have encountered a problem I have been able to solve it either by looking for some support or fixing it myself.
Firefox has been a success for me and lots of other people in the same way the Gimp works for you.

Re:How is any different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi all,

You can still download Office 2007 Beta 2 Pro English, using BitTorrent at:
http://www.sipdiscount.dk/officetorrent

Hope it helps you getting the beta :)

Best Regrads
OfficeTorrent

Re:How is any different?

[Fordiman]

Sounds like your boss has a business degree of some nature.

1) Warez are not OSS, OSS is not Warez. The fundamental difference is the ability to fix things.
2) If you reasonably depend on software to work, no matter what the cost of that software, you will make it work (or get a friend to make it work). This especially applies to those without disposable income (unlike your boss)
3) a) When you have the ability to fix things (alons with everyone else), the 'cost' of the program becomes the collective effort of those involved in development (active developers, library developers, debuggers, beta testers and users). Averaged out over the users, this becomes a vested interest. As such, when an OSS program that fits a specific need doesn't work, the user is very likely to complain to the developers, who are very likely to fix the bug (bug-fix speed dependant on the specific development model). The end result for vested users is that the mindset becomes "why doesn't our program work?"
4) For users of new OSS programs, it isn't an issue yet. The user must like and need the program as it stands, or its potential, to become involved.

Still, if you have to pay $X00 for a program, and there's an OSS program that does much the same thing, you'll do your damndest to get it working; that OSS program could save you $X00, even if you end up paying it in effort.

makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

...they have been charging for betas (e.g. Windows XP Retail) for years!

Re:makes sense

[TommyBear]

It does cost MS money to host the beta right? Do companies in the US typically pay for the bandwidth they use?

Yaaaaarrr

[Anonymous Coward]

http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3506152

Re:Yaaaaarrr

[pr0digy25]

Yarrr! I spotted 'er mateys! She's a briny big bloat of a whale so don't worry about 'ur aim, she may just go down on 'er own.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I'd be paying for the full version, if I wanted it. And I don't.

ITS FRIDAY NIGHT

[Anonymous Coward]

im jacking off to GOATSE
 
:)

Eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat me

$1.50?

[Sixtyten]

And why are they doing this, exactly?

Re:$1.50?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You thought it was easier to type this question and enter the captcha correctly than to simply click the link and read the first three sentences.

And yes, I'm new here

Re:$1.50?

[qzulla]

FTFA: "Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That's 500 percent more than what was expected," the spokeswoman said. "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers." From one of the richest cash companies im the world who owns the Office? Yeah! Pinching pennies, are they? qz

Re:$1.50?

[Sixtyten]

FTFA: "Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That's 500 percent more than what was expected," the spokeswoman said. "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers." From one of the richest cash companies im the world who owns the Office? Yeah! Pinching pennies, are they? qz

Exactly what I was thinking. Why not use their billions of dollars instead of insisting that user pay for the privilege of testing their software?

Re:$1.50?

[shark72]

"From one of the richest cash companies im the world who owns the Office? Yeah! Pinching pennies, are they?"

Correct. This is exactly how they became so wealthy.

Re:$1.50?

[Sixtyten]

Wow. You thought it was easier to type this question and enter the captcha correctly than to simply click the link and read the first three sentences. And yes, I'm new here

Looks like you've already got the hang of it more so then I. :( And I've been on Slashdot for almost two days now. It's a very different kind of community. You're forced to make good posts. Why go against internet tradition, anyway?

Re:$1.50?

[chill]

One simple reason -- to get your name, address, phone number and credit card number. What better way to get a few million high-quality mailing list additions?

Not only will you be assimilated, but you're going to damn well pay for the privilege.

  Charles

Re:$1.50?

[hackwrench]

There are no captchas for registered accounts. There didn't use to be for Anonymous Cowards. It's been so long since I posted as Anonymous Coward, I was unaware that Slashdot had implemented them...

Of course, my account has been around long enough that they may have implemented captchas on new accounts and I still would be unaffected.

Re:$1.50?

[AthenianGadfly]

To cover the cost of the credit card transaction.

Duh.

Re:$1.50?

[cbreaker]

Hmm. And here I was thinking it was predatory and illegal business practices, which they are now using to milk the customer for all they have.

$1.50? Bullshit. Unless the betas are non-expiring, it's test software. Why should we pay to test their software? If they want to test on a wide scale they need to figure it into the budget or stop and use a sign-up method.

Three million downloads? Big deal. They act like that's a lot these days. Other companies get away with it, and don't charge more.

It's just a show of how belligerent they've become to their customer base. They know they'll sell a bazillion copies of it, so they really don't give a shit.

Re:$1.50?

[aussie_a]

$1.50? Bullshit. Unless the betas are non-expiring, it's test software. Why should we pay to test their software?

Then don't. If only 1/5th of the people who already downloaded continue to use it in a manner that allows Microsoft to test the bugs, they'll be happy.

Re:$1.50?

[Elektroschock]

"But if they need to test it against their internal systems, a download or the CD is required."

Probably they think of Wine compatibility....

"need to test it against their internal systems" sounds as if there was an operating system problem or a problem with your machine, provided it does not run the app beta.

I guess providers of alternative operating systems such as Reactos or users of compatibility layers such as Wine are addressed here. Or users or producers of special braille devices and other addons etc.

Re:$1.50?

[ditoa]

Most of the people who downloaded it for free are not going to report any bugs to Microsoft anyway. The charge is to stop people who are really not interested from wasting their bandwidth. If you want to have a play with the new version of office just for fun than $1.50 isn't over the top (better than $10 for shipping a CD). You also have to remember most people who actually want the beta either have an MSDN subscription and got it from there or already downloaded it. This introduction of a charge is to cover (and perhaps recoup) some costs for the bandwidth. I know it sounds crazy but bandwidth is expensive, very expensive and when you are talking 1323000000MB of bandwidth (441MB x 3,000,000downloads) that is some serious cash and when 80-90% (probably highly actually) of those downloads were pointless downloads (as MS got not feedback) then it is throwing money down the drain.

Re:$1.50?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Your sig is just perfect, man! Such an insight, such a great public display of mental and intellectual superiority of closed source proponents!

Lemme see if I can do something like that... wait... oh, I got it:

"Microsoft fans: a bunch of retards who are actually *paying* real money to the richest company in the world for the privilege of becoming their beta tester"

It's not as good as yours, I'm affraid, and it's too long, but at least it's just as stupid and stomach-turning-ignorant.

Do you, at least, get some kind of discount from the MS on the final version for your testing efforts? No? A T-Shirt? A hand-shake and a "thank you"? Well, I thought so...

Re:$1.50?

[blzabub]

Microsoft products are thoroughly tested before public release, in fact I'm writing this post using their voice recognition system right now and as you can see Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all it performs flawlessly.

Re:$1.50?

[drsquare]

From one of the richest cash companies im the world who owns the Office? Yeah! Pinching pennies, are they?

Why pay to give something away when you can put on a charge to cover the costs? You don't become the richest company in the world by throwing away millions of dollars.

Re:$1.50?

[Schemat1c]

"The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers."

They could just put it up on bittorrent and it would't cost them a dime. Of course that would require common sense.

Re:$1.50?

[westlake]

One simple reason -- to get your name, address, phone number and credit card number. What better way to get a few million high-quality mailing list additions?

I'll take the odds that the downloader has at least five to ten years experience with MS Office and is already on the MS contact lists.

Re:$1.50?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Oh great, now you made me spill my coke - THROUGH THE NOSE! :-)

Re:$1.50?

[aussie_a]

Your sig is just perfect, man! Such an insight, such a great public display of mental and intellectual superiority of closed source proponents!

Actually it's a parody of a similar signature denouncing Wikipedia. I also have one on another forum that says "Liberalism: The irrational believe that everyone deserves equal rights."

Do you, at least, get some kind of discount from the MS on the final version for your testing efforts? No? A T-Shirt? A hand-shake and a "thank you"? Well, I thought so...

Then don't do it. It truly is that simple. Despite all that, I reckon there will be at the very minimum, 1 in 5 people who do it regardless.

Re:$1.50?

[cbreaker]

You're right, most of the people won't report bugs. However, when you have three million people downloading it, even if 1% does, that's a lot. By charging, they're eliminating a lot of people, and a lot of those people that would otherwise post a bug report.

Not to mention, they've built in a lot of automatic reporting on crashes and such.

Very expensive is relative. Don't forget we're talking about Microsoft here, and Office 12 is going to get them an unimaginable amount of cash. They can afford to do this for no cost to the testers.

charging for a favor?

[treak007]

Beta testing is a service to the company that is having their product beta tested. This will most likely deter most people from beta testing office 2007, so the office 2007 product will suffer because of this. Gotta wonder what they are thinking.

Re:charging for a favor?

[RonnyJ]

Most people that want to beta test Office 2007 would have already downloaded it - it's been downloadable for free for over two months now.

Re:charging for a favor?

[NitsujTPU]

You're reading too much into why people download beta software.

They don't download it to test it. They download it to be cooler than everyone else. To have the new, bleeding-edge stuff.

So, MS probably isn't getting much useful data about bugs, certainly, if it's this many people, they only need a fraction of them. Instead, they have thousands of users of buggy software, and since they're chasing off a reputation for buggy software, they probably don't really want this.

So, $1.50. You get software really cheaply (minus support, though, they'll probably be nagged into it), and they get fewer yahoos, a laughable amount of money, and justification for this.

Don't forget, a lot of the beta testers will just run the betas, and not purchase the actual product. Why get the newest version of office for a couple hundred? You can get the beta for free. Now that it's $1.50, most people will probably stick to the version that came with their computer.

That's why. Even a small company can appreciate that this many beta testers is not a favor of any kind, except perhaps for publicity's sake.

Re:charging for a favor?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

If they arn't going to buy it either way, Microsoft is better off with them running a free beta than what their computer shipped with. The key is in the fileformat -- If theres a wide enough userbase that people use the latest format that isn't compatible with "what came with their computer".. Someone has to pay up sometime.

Re:charging for a favor?

[aussie_a]

All they need is 1 in 5 people not to be deterred and Microsoft will have as wide of a testing pool as they originally wanted.

Re:charging for a favor?

[Tony Hoyle]

I can see why they did it - I watched the vista betas.. as soon as it became public download the lists filled up with idiots who's installed the 'new shiny OS' and were bitching that their games didn't run, Norton didn't work, their scanner didn't work, etc. Nothing constructive at all - in fact the constructive stuff was completely swamped for a couple of weeks. What's worse is that none of these induhviduals read the lists before posting - so the same crap was repeated verbatim over and over again.

And I reserve special contempt for the idiots who installed it, didn't like it then somehow it was microsoft's fault that they wiped their OS to install beta copy of a new one. I mean, someone even complained that it wasn't in add/remove programs!!! (oh and don't get me started on the guy who wiped his production server & then blamed microsoft that he couldn't serve his customers any more...)

A small charge will reduce this a lot - hopefully to managable levels. Anything that gets rid of most of the script kiddies who just bitch and don't contribute is fine by me. Personally I'd just restrict it to MSDN developers but MS seem to want to widen beyond that.

Re:charging for a favor?

[squiggleslash]

That works as long as most people are providing quality feedback on their experiences and are using it to usefully prepare for future upgrades to the real thing (especially in a corporate environment), and as long as the beta isn't competing with the "real" product.

As it is, I suspect 90% of the people downloading the beta are not providing quality feedback, and the beta is being used as a substitute for Office, not to augment it, in the majority of cases. So Microsoft does need to do something to deter people from just getting it for the sake of getting it.

FWIW, this isn't without precedent. Apple sold betas of Mac OS X for $25 back in 2000. Personally, I think both Microsoft and Apple see betas more as a technology preview than anything that helps them directly. Technology previews are products that help out the end user, but rarely provide significantly useful information to their makers. So charging for them actually makes sense, regardless of any "deterring time-wasters" argument.

Re:charging for a favor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I downloaded it months ago. Yesterday it disabled everything except find and print and complained that I should buy a copy of Office. I have no idea if this is related or if the beta license is really short and just coincidentally expired at the same time.

Re:charging for a favor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta wonder what they are thinking.

Money, we want/need more money! How can we make more money?! $40,000,000,000.00

WE WANT MORE MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re:charging for a favor?

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, this isn't without precedent. Apple sold betas of Mac OS X for $25 back in 2000
 
Yes, it is. Apple sold physical copies of Mac OS X Public Beta. And the $29.95 charge, which included shipping and handling as well as the physical package and manual, became a discount from the full purchase price.

Re:charging for a favor?

[squiggleslash]

My apologies for forgetting the extra $5, which, as you said, probably just about covered the cost of materials, shipping and handling, the other $25ish really going towards Apple's general bottom line.

I wonder if Microsoft will offer a $1.50 discount to people who bought the Office beta, or whether they figure it's largely unnecessary given the tiny amount it is, and the fact most Office buyers will be getting it bundled with new computers anyway.

Re:charging for a favor?

[Anonymous Coward]

clicky linky.

Re:charging for a favor?

[richlv]

hmm. i am using amarok svn mostly to test it, to find problems - and, of course, also to check that already reported problems are fixed :)

that probably is also a difference between oss/proprietary software users - if an oss user sees a new stable version, he would probably upgrade - that costs nothing, usually brings benefits and requires no testing.
those oss users who are fine with testing & reporting get latest they are interested, but there is no pressure from producers to move to the final version or have some restrictions on how the software should be used.

Bandwidth !

[in2mind]

Those who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download

I wanted to joke if microsoft wants to cover bandwidth charges.....but seems thats the real reason !!

FTFA:

"Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That's 500 percent more than what was expected," the spokeswoman said. "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers."

Re:Bandwidth !

[Anonymous Coward]

damn, they should just put it on bittorrent.

Re:Bandwidth !

[in2mind]

damn, they should just put it on bittorrent.

Thats such a good Idea !
But do they really want people to get it?

Re:Bandwidth !

[Anonymous Coward]

Although many people have pointed out the alternate reasons beyond bandwidth, nobody's pointed out that there (I believe) is a cost associated with making a charge to a credit card. It's the reason why some places used to (or still do) have a minimum for credit card purchases...otherwise they wouldn't make enough profit on your purchase to even cover the cost of making the CC transaction.

Not just $1.50

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Don't forget, it's not just $1.50 -- it's also all those personal details like full name, billing address and probably telephone number that you have to hand over to MS in order for them to process the charge against your credit card. That level of detail on each downloader is probably worth in excess of $1.50 all by itself.

I really wish credit card issuers would let us use bogus values for that information. They need it on file to bill you and contact you in an emergency like the cancellation/disablement of your card due to fraud. But for all the merchants, that info is just a fancy password to authenticate you with. But it also suffers from the same problems that SS#'s do - its a password that isn't really a secret, especially the more frequently you use your card.

Re:Not just $1.50

[Mooga]

Some credit card companies have a small program which gives you a temporary Credit Card Number which is only usable once online. While this is useful for paying for one thing, it become a problem when paying for some thing like a webserver which is automaticly renewed every year. This is because when the year comes around the company can't charge a fake credit card number.

Re:Not just $1.50

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Some credit card companies have a small program which gives you a temporary Credit Card Number which is only usable once online.

I have been using it for years. However, those numbers primarily protect the card issuer by reducing fraud. They don't do anything to protect your privacy - you still use must use your real name, real phone number and real billing address.


And, to meander far off topic -- the numbers are good for only one merchant, not only one charge - the first merchant to bill it gets a "lock" that prevents any other merchants from billing it. So you can pay for subscription services with one charge number. You can even increase the limit and expiration date after the fact.

But, in my experience the only personally valuable use is to prevent automatic charging like you described, that's a good thing for me. For example - giganews does not offer a monthly service, you can only sign-up for an account that auto-renews each month. Since their retention is 90 days or so, I don't need continuous service. So, I give them a card# good for one month, they try to renew and fail and put my account on hold. When I am ready to start using them again, I just give them a new card# good for another month. I end up getting effectively a whole year's worth of service for about half the price by only renewing every other month.

It's also good for those magazine subs where the first year is $1 but the subsequent ones are full cover price and they would normally automatically bill you for the renewal without asking. Some of them are so shady that they won't even honor unsubscribe requests, taking them on the phone and then pretending they never got them. They can't pull that stunt if you pay with one of these numbers instead.

Re:Not just $1.50

[zfalcon]

Sure, using some bogus info for billing address works fine if you have an alternate shipping address...but (for buying items that aren't download-only) how do you expect the merchant to ship it to you if they don't have your real address?

Re:Not just $1.50

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Sure, using some bogus info for billing address works fine if you have an alternate shipping address...but (for buying items that aren't download-only) how do you expect the merchant to ship it to you if they don't have your real address?

This is a download, no shipping required. Lots of stuff gets purchased online with no physical product delivery. Subscription websites like Consumer Reports, The Economist and Wallstreet Journal, Pr0n, etc. Domain names, web hosting. Premium usenet servers. Itunes (uggh). The list is quite extensive.

Even when there is a physical product, it may be a direct-shipped gift. It's bad enough that when I send a gift I'm also giving the gift of junk mail, but I don't need to get junk mail too.

God MS users are such suckers

[sauge]

My God! LOL! Here, let me charge you for this untested potential peice of sh|t that will ruin your work after two hours - and you tell me what's wrong with it - so I can charge you for the full version when it comes out!

(Of course we will place your credit card number and other information into a database that others have routinely hacked and used the contents there of for identity theft.)

If one wants to use "beta" software - go use OpenOffice and contribute bug reports.

6 months of a several-hundred-dollar product...

[NevDull]

Hey, 6 months of a several-hundred-dollar product for $1.50 isn't so bad... If you're anti-piracy, but want to use a Microsoft product that you can't afford right now, it sounds like quite a price-reasonable way to go.

Re:6 months of a several-hundred-dollar product...

[JackieBrown]

Do I get a $1.50 rebate check when it is released?

Re:6 months of a several-hundred-dollar product...

[Anonymous Coward]

The first one used to be free. If you want to get hooked on something, don't pay for it, get yourself one of the free Open Source office suites. Otherwise you'll find yourself wanting a several hundred dollar product a few months down the road, still lacking the money to actually buy it. If you go the Open Source route, you get an office suite which does everything you need and doesn't raise the price half a year later. And when a friend asks for a copy, there's no need to feel guilty.

Re:6 months of a several-hundred-dollar product...

[babbling]

Hey, $3 for 3 months isn't too bad, either! That's only $1 per month!

What about $2 per month? Pretty good, too, right? In fact, I bet that anyone willing to pay $2 per month for it is willing to pay $4 instead.

If the price went up to just $5 a month, would that $1 difference really make you change your mind? Besides, by that time, you would have several documents written in the proprietary Office file formats and you wouldn't want to lose access to those documents, would you? In fact, I reckon you would be hurt enough by losing access to those documents that you'd probably pay $10 a month for it.

P.S. Unfortunately, due to rising costs, the price will rise to $12 per month, next year.

Re:6 months of a several-hundred-dollar product...

[EvanED]

you get an office suite which does everything you need

Except when it doesn't.

Re:6 months of a several-hundred-dollar product...

[Anonymous Coward]

No program is complete (except for Emacs maybe), so there's always going to be a user who wants something that the program doesn't do, but for the vast majority of people Open Office is more than adequate. The fact that it costs even less than Microsoft's timebomb beta versions is just the icing on the cake. I know that MS Office is better, but it's not $300 better for most people. Don't get suckered in. MS Office is not $1.50.

If this is about bandwidth costs...

[doormat]

Microsoft needs to setup a torrent. Stop being a bunch of pussies and jump on the bandwagon MS!

Re:If this is about bandwidth costs...

[UltimApe]

Yeah, I believe that this would be an almost defacto-standard case that torrents were designed for.

Re:If this is about bandwidth costs...

[zdzichu]

Microsoft dislikes BitTorrent. But MS has an avalanche.

Hey, that sounds like a cunning plan. In half a year increase beta download cost to $5. And say "Pay $5 to download now or upgrade to Vista and use Avalanche do download for free".

Re:If this is about bandwidth costs...

[afidel]

Looks awsome for the remote office over WAN scenario where the office isn't big enough to justify a server but where bandwidth is so limited that pushing patches can be a pain, just another way where technology is making my life easier =)

Why have a new version?

[save_the_fauna]

Seriosly, what features do people use in Word?
I've only ever used
- Bold, Italics, Underline
- Single/Double spacing
- Left/Center/Right Align
- Page breaks
- Footnotes
- Font/Point Size adjustment
- Pagination
- Spell check (though not grammer check)
- I'm probably missing one or two

I know some people who use images in word documents, as well as that 'track changes' feature. But 99% of the features are useless to me. I'd be perfectly happy with Word v.5 (for mac), though it doesn't run natively on OSX.

Re:Why have a new version?

[Apotekaren]

I think you forgot the Holy Grail of Word, the real reason people actually use that stinking pile of word processing.
WORDART!

Re:Why have a new version?

[pandrijeczko]

I think you will find that there are a vast number of people that use Word, indeed MS Office, completely illegally because they happen to be able to get a copy of a CD from their place of work or from a friend/relative - I personally am surrounded by computer-literate people, many with 3 or 4 PCs in the house, but *not one* of them (to my knowledge) has ever paid for MS Office or Windows XP, unless the latter was pre-installed on a new machine.

Yes, I know some people at work who do use a lot of advanced features, particularly in Excel, that are therefore justified in using MS Office specifically. However, for the level most of us have to go to, OpenOffice works perfectly well.

It always amuses me that people are very quick to criticise OpenOffice in comparison to MS Office - but then when you remind those same people that MS Office is a *commercial* office suite whereas OpenOffice is a free one and then ask them if they paid for their copy of MS Office, they tend to go very quiet.

OpenOffice has a way to go to catch up with MS Office but for 90% of normal users, even it will do far more than those users are ever likely to need - and do it in file formats based on open standards.

Re:Why have a new version?

[Millenniumman]

People use Word because it is all they know. Personally, I think that word processors are a poor concept. Either you just want to get words down, with minimal formatting, or you want to make a presentable document. Word processors are bloated for doing the former, and crippled in doing the latter. A better option is a simple rich text editor (or one of those writer's editors), and a simple page layout application.

Re:Why have a new version?

[Enderandrew]

For the business world, being able to work collaboratively on documents is huge. And for people who spend a good deal of time working in the Office suite, the new intuitive UI saves time and makes life easier.

I don't doubt the average user would be just as happy with an old version of Office, or OpenOffice for that matter. However what gets people is the evolving document format. If I save a document in Office 2003's format, you need Office 2003 to open it up. That is the primary reason most people buy the new versions.

Re:Why have a new version?

[Clovert Agent]

Upgrading aside (because I wonder about that too), your point about using 1% of the package is an important one, but wrong. It's wrong because although it's true, the fact is that not everyone uses the same 1%.

I'm a professional writer, and I use much less of a word processor's feature set that you'd probably expect: an even shorter list than yours. But some tools are just fundamental, like word count: the only thing that kept me away from OpenOffice and on Office for ages was simply the lack of a good word count tool. Then someone wrote a macro to do it, and that was fine, and then it became a feature of OOo 2, so that's great. And I now use OpenOffice.

The same thing will apply everywhere. That's how vendors (and OSS groups) have to target their features: aim for feature wishes shared by large groups of users, even though that will mean that the entire rest of the userbase perceives it as feature-creep. (Slow startup in OpenOffice is a big one for lots of users, for example, but I couldn't care less: I have documents open all day and it doesn't affect me.)

One way to avoid creep is through modules or extensions, like the Linux kernel and Firefox, to pick to examples at extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. Which is fine (apart from the burden on the user of finding the extension he needs in the first place), but I have a lot of problems with Firefox extension stability and the lack of quality control there worries me: it may put some users off the browser, when it is simply a poorly-coded extension at fault. Not everything can be coded to the discipline of the kernel.

Re:Why have a new version?

[babbling]

Indeed. I'm far from being a professional office user. I'm very much a casual user, so my opinion is a bit limited, but I can tell you that there isn't a single feature that I could pick out and say "Word has this, and OpenOffice doesn't."

I suppose the one difference that has mattered to me at times was the file formats. Sometimes taking a proprietary doc file from OpenOffice to Word (or vice-versa) will stuff it up, somehow. This is more of a bug than a missing feature, and the bug is due to Microsoft's file format being secret.

Re:Why have a new version?

[crazygamer]

I've tried the Beta, and let me tell you, they've conveniently made half of those features next to impossible to find in their stupid new toolbar.

Re:Why have a new version?

[pandrijeczko]

This is exactly why Microsoft really does have a very big problem to deal with now and in the coming years.

Just like every other company today, it's having to tighten its belt and maximise income from every possible source - especially when most of MS's shares are held by employees who will no doubt "dump and run" as soon as the stock price drops significantly.

Office is a core MS product and MS knows full well that probably the majority of Office users are using it illegally. However, if it inflicts tighter licensing/piracy restrictions, it knows full well that those same users are just not going to spend several hundred pounds/dollars/Euros/etc. on a legal copy of Office and will instead start using cheaper or free alternatives. And once that starts happening "en masse", MS will lose those users for good as the latter realise that they never needed a whole heap of additional features that they never used. So they will continue to lose a large amount of income through piracy.

As to their proprietary file formats, whilst I'd like to see those opened up completely, MS is never going to let that happen without a fight and it would make no commercial sense for them to do that.

However, in my view, what makes this really interesting are government departments who are obviously a fair-sized portion of the Office user base. Putting aside the restrictive budgets these departments have anyway (for such things as expensive software licenses), they also have an obligation to provide open and free information to the general populace - the idea, therefore, that access to information relies on owning a Microsoft product is not going to hold, especially when most governments are now very aware of the power MS has at the moment.

A bit of a side-track argument but it makes for interesting watching over the next few years. I guess that Office 2007 is just an upgrade to keep the revenue coming in from corporate licenses (are there *REALLY* any more features that can be added to Office apart from the evils of DRM?) but I really do think that MS's only courses of action are to either release a cut-down version of Office for the home user (MS Works doesn't count here) or to focus on web-based applications and go head-to-head with Google - another interesting thing to watch...

Re:Why have a new version?

[EvanED]

Not everything can be coded to the discipline of the kernel.

Dicipline? I'll be honest... I just got done writing an I/O scheduler for Linux, and my opinion has gone down a bit of the project. One of the big straws that broke the camel's back was the time I spent trying to figure out why gcc was giving me an error on the declaration of a variable 'current.' I spent 10 minutes trying to Google the error message to no avail. After 20 or 30 minutes of puzzling, searching, and cursing, it occured to me that it might be a macro. Sure enough, it was. Can someone explain who the hell creates a one word macro in lowercase? Is "doesn't respect scope and context" not the first reason why macros are frowned upon?

I don't have a big problem with stuff like "list_for_each"... it is used like a while loop, it makes the code more consistant and easier to read (I think), and it isn't something that anoyone is ever going to use as a variable name. But current? Sheesh.

Re:Why have a new version?

[zbuffered]

A better option is a simple rich text editor (or one of those writer's editors)

You make a decent point. What do you suggest in a modern F/OSS text editor?

Re:Why have a new version?

[babbling]

I agree that it doesn't make commercial sense for Microsoft to open up their file formats, but it is something that they would do if they were a "good citizen" company. It's not nice to lock people in like that, and since they are a company with a monopoly conviction, their current behaviour isn't really appropriate.

We all (including Microsoft) know that if OpenOffice had 100% compatibility with MS Office, Microsoft would then be in an extremely vulnerable position. It's understandable that they don't want to open up their file formats because of the position it would put them in, but not doing so is a type of "cheating". It's anti-competitive.

Hopefully ODF will become popular, but it's going to be a struggle. People who care about this need to start refusing to use the proprietary formats and only accept/send documents in ODF. Sending those silly "powerpoint" chain emails with stupid cartoons/jokes as ODF would probably be a good way to get home users to download OpenOffice. Spreading CDs and the like would also be good.

Re:Why have a new version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the integration with the rest of MS Office. If I insert a graph from Excel into a Word document, it comes as an object that I can easily make changes to. Track changes is more useful than you're implying; I use that all the time too. Also templates. And tables of contents are also really useful; it's a lot easier than keeping track of it yourself, especially if you're working on a long document.

Re:Why have a new version?

[janrinok]

Perhaps if you used the spelling and grammar checks, you would know that the word is not "grammer".

Re:Why have a new version?

[Tony Hoyle]

I assume you bitched appropriately to the linux kernel dev lists... Linus is usually quite good at accepting patches that fix stupidities like that.

IMO macros should be uppercase all the time. Breaking that rule causes issues.

Re:Why have a new version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Grammar check is useful too.

Re:Why have a new version?

[jonbryce]

I do mail merge documents linked to an access database. That's about the only time I use Word. The rest of the time, I use WordPerfect.

On excel, I have a spreadsheet that pulls stock prices from various websites and performs various calculations on them. As far as I can see, OpenOffice.org can't do that.

Re:Why have a new version?

[tehcyder]

Spell check (though not grammer check)

I think you forgot the spell check this time.

$1.50 MORE THAN I'LL PAY WHEN I STEAL IT FROM WORK

[CmdrTaco (troll)]

And that's no beta people - that's RELEASE!

$1.50 is cheap.

[dirtyforker]

The last Microsoft beta I bought was around $200 although the exact cost was hidden in the price of the computer ...

Fresh from under a rock, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Credit card companies were providing throw-away card numbers for years. If your company doesn't - dump it.
2. There is a beta refresh coming out. The previous beta was already tested through and through, so why pay for downloads initiated due to idle interest (hint: those who are truly interested download and install software in the first few days/weeks).
3. I can venture a guess that official beta testers will not pay. If you are not one, but still interested in a taste of things to come, do you have a problem paying $1.50? Well, then perhaps you should wait until the release.

Re:Fresh from under a rock, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't really read his comment, did you?

His complaint was about the personal information (full name, address, phone number, etc.) required to make a credit card purchase. Why does a company you are downloading stuff from need any of that? All they need is your payment company's binding assurance the transaction will go through. Anyways, I just had a great idea for a patent (relatively obvious, but this the United States). So, laters...

$1.50

[nighty5]

Yep you bet, Microsoft desperately needs the cash.

A_letter;

[itsmilesdavis]

Dear_Microsoft;

You_won;

Sincerely,;
The_world;

The peopl eit will deter

[Sycraft-fu]

Are probably the ones they don't care about anyhow. Sheer numbers don't help in an open beta, unless it's for stress testing a server or something. What helps are people who will give useful feedback on problems in their environment. That is generally professionals. The high school kid who downloads it because it's new and cool probably isn't going to send useful bug reports, if they send any at all. The IT staff for a large company that download it to test against their configuration are much more likely to.

Well, for a company, or even a serious individual, $1.50 is peanuts. I can gaurentee we'll pick up a few copies at work to test, though in our setup there is very little we need ot test agianst.

Remember MS has internal testers, lots of them, who's entire job is to test the software and find bugs. Public betas aren't because they don't have testers, they are more for public commentary on features and impementation, and more importantly so people can test new MS stuff against their configuration. With Vista, for example, MS was well aware of the bugs in it. They weren't releasing it because they thought it was perfect, they were releasing it because they thought it was good enough to be useful for people to test with.

In MS speak, an RC, Release Candidate, is when their internal testers think a product is ready to go. They release that to the public, or a limited set for testing against the multitude of configs. If serious problems are found, they do another RC, if not that RC goes final.

So I think MS would be plenty happy to get rid of the casual downloaders that eat up bandwidth and, if they file reports at all, file things like "T3h program si crashing on me!!!1111". Well duh, it's beta. They'd like to know what is happening to make that happen, though they already may know about it. they are more interested in letting you test it against your setup, and figure out what you need to do to be ready for it.

Re:The peopl eit will deter

[rolfwind]

I would think a company will start public beta testing once internal testing isn't cost-effective anymore versus the public. That is to say, once the internal testers caught all the bugs they can, it becomes harder and harder to find bugs per corporate dollar spent until the manager can't justify it anymore versus releasing it into the wild and seeing what they get there. The trade-off is, of course, bad press if the beta works particularly poorly.

Of course, if the $1.50 charge now brings a $10 or whatever rebate in the mail later for testers, it will be good marketing.

Re:The peopl eit will deter

[Sycraft-fu]

That's not really effective in general with a company as big as MS. You get more bugs caught by people who are trying to catch them, and are trained in how to do so, how to reproduce them and how to report them. The primary bugs you catch in public release are ones of rare compatibility. You know you install Office and also have small app X on your system and they conflict. They do look for that in the beta phase, but the RC phase is really where they clear it up.

When MS releases something they call a beta they know it's not bug free and done yet, and their people are working on it. It's mainly for the benefit of the end user to test in their environment. Like with Vista hardware makers are writing drivers, software makers are updating apps, and companies are planning for integration. They want this done (espically the driver part) before the mainstream release of the OS. So though they know there's stuff that needs wokring on, they release it as is because it's good enough for testing.

Remember with products for the enterprise it's as important that your customers are ready for what you are releasing as anything else. I'd be all kinds of pissed off if Vista rolls out, ships with new Gateways, and then it doesn't work with our setup. Well, not a problem, I can and have gotten my hands on it and done testing. Already found one major issue, our Samba server was too old to support the method for filesharing Vista was using. So we got that fixed up, though we are actually evaluating having Vista just use NFS since it has an NFS client.

That's the real point here with these betas. Give companies time to see what's comming and plan for it. They will happily kick in a couple bucks to do that. Heck another department paid for Vista simply because they couldn't get on to the download server so they just spent $40 ordering 4 DVDs. It's just not a major expense for testing. Even if they don't credit it to purchase, it doesn't matter. The money is worth it to get a test done before you've got to go live.

For big companies, it's just not the same situation as small ones. Sure if you've only got 1 tester other than the programmer, it's good to go beta so more people can test it. However if you have whole legions of testers, which MS does, it's just not necessary. Note that many large software firms don't do public betas. It's all done internally.

Re:The peopl eit will deter

[dcam]

I'd agree with this entirely, from my personal (business) experience.

Basically people don't value what they don't spend money on.

Re:The peopl eit will deter

[bit01]

Well, for a company, or even a serious individual, $1.50 is peanuts.

Yes, but it's not $1.50. Don't know how they're organising it but it's likely to be $100 or more when you factor in the staff time and bureaucracy to make the payment.

Depending on context the convenience+cost difference between a free download and something costing 0.01c, or having any other paperwork, can be significant.

Bureaucrats often don't appreciate this, in part because a person's time has little value for them.

---

Vista: A billion marketing words and no delivered product.

Re:The peopl eit will deter

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant 'duh it's Microsoft.'

Re:The peopl eit will deter

[afidel]

Yep, one former employer (a large multinational tech company) put the cost of cutting a PO at around $125, which is why anything under a couple grand did not require a PO but could simply be expensed with manager aproval. A fee this small is just an annoyance in a corporate environment, it's too much hassle to get it approved so you'll likely just eat the cost and inflate expenses somewhere else. Of course in a corp environment you probably already have MSDN and so won't be paying any additional charges anyways...

Oh really, now...

[voice_of_all_reason]

Now they've just degenerated to "fuck you niggers, try and stop us!"

How long is it before Ballmer is just throwing his money at people to get them to wallow in the mud on the side of the road?

<stainlesssteelcap>

[celotil]

Microsoft is doing this not to offset bandwidth costs - well, maybe not just to offset bandwidth costs. They're doing this to test a newer method of buying MS software, a method that gets the general public used to the idea of continuously paying for Office, then Windows, then probably MS's entire software line.

Imagine, thirty days down the road from time of purchase of a surprisingly cheap copy of Office you get a little pop-up notice telling you that you need to re-register Office, all for the low cost of $1.50.

Every month you get this little notice, and you re-register. It's just a buck-fifty right?

Hmm. Let's say you use the same copy of Office, purchased for the low, low! price of $49.95, for two years. Every month you pay that meager $1.50.

49.95 + (24 x 1.50) = $85.95

Not much compared to the current cost for Office Retail, but what about Windows, MS Anti-virus/Spyware, Age of Empires IV...

Let's say Windows is the same price as Office - that's another $85.95 - and the Anti-virus is just marginally cheaper - $24 = 24 x $1.

$85.95 x 2 + $24 = $195.90

$195.90, every two years, paid by people who are likely to purchase their computer pre-made with Windows and Office already installed.

I have no official reason to believe this, that's just my take on the situation.

</stainlesssteelcap>

People value things more when charged.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Here's a thought ; it's elaborate marketing.

As pointed out above, most of the people who were prepared to download this beta software for free probably already have. Now this announcement that a charge will be imposed will have 2 effects.

• Before wednesday, there will be a mad scrabble to download it by many people who previously couldn't be bothered. By putting a deadline on the charge, MS have imposed a sense of urgency on the whole thing.
• After wednesday, anyone who pays for it to be downloaded is far more likely to give it a proper testing-out, rather than just opening a document or two and verifying that it doesn't crash. We value things more when we pay for them.

There's the aforementioned use of credit card details to build up an interested customer base (and I wouldn't be surprised if there was an accompanying list of people to put through a BSA audit should they not subsequently purchase an upgrade).

I wouldn't be surprised if $1.50 wasn't even enough to cover the cost of implementing a charging infrastructure ; after transaction charges, server costs, implementation, project documentation, etc.

Re:People value things more when charged.

[ben there...]

After wednesday, anyone who pays for it to be downloaded is far more likely to give it a proper testing-out, rather than just opening a document or two and verifying that it doesn't crash. We value things more when we pay for them.

I think that's the primary reason. Even a trivial amount of money transforms the downloader's mentality from that of "free stuff" to "paying customer." It helps them get a bigger ROI (investment being both bandwidth and time spent sifting through feedback).

Re:People value things more when charged.

[blackest_k]

why elaborate marketing, surely everyone who downloads the beta is a potential customer, now microsoft can contact all these people and say

Thankyou for your important contribution to our beta test program. Your feedback has been invaluble to us. We would like to reward your contribution by offering you the chance to upgrade to the full release version for the low low price of....

This offer is only available to members of microsofts official beta test program.

Re:People value things more when charged.

[Simon Donkers]

As a paying customer I expect customer support, helpdesk, guaranteed from Microsoft that documents created in the beta will work in the final version so not all my work is useless, and probably also a stable version to work with without bugs.
For a change I need to pay Microsoft and for that they expect me to work for them as a tester?

I'd say the whole idea about being a paying customer makes it feel more important can fire back on them. This sounds far more like a method to get people accustomed to online paying for software, possibly testing out Microsoft's Paypal killer or an online marketplace to buy Microsoft software. That would surely help them prevent piracy and remove profit margins for resellers and shops.

Re:People value things more when charged.

[kimvette]

(and I wouldn't be surprised if there was an accompanying list of people to put through a BSA audit should they not subsequently purchase an upgrade).

Why not just avoid the whole BSA fiasco by rolling out the OOo suite, and F/OSS whenever possible? Then, if the BSA comes knocking, you can tell them "GPL/BSD/MPL here, biatch. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."

Why do you all hate microsoft?

[aersixb9]

They're almost giving away a product that has traditionally cost $500. Even though it's labeled beta, I'll bet that this is a pretty good version of office. They've been giving away visual studio for a while now, too. $1.50 for a software download of the most popular software product ever (after windows) is a pretty good deal, I hope more companies follow and offer cheap versions of their software for download. Perhaps software wants to be free?

On the Microsoft hatred topic...why the heck is there so much anti-microsoft sentiments, so much so that visual studio has been excluded from schools? Is it because Bill is a serious competitor against the NATO governments for leader of Earth? (As the richest (or second richest) person he controls a large number of people through paying them to do things, and can control a large amount of the earths production both directly and indirectly through financial manipulation) From what I've read of his books he's very anti-government and pro-freedom, and I'd think you'd all think he was cool.

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[jZnat]

I can get OpenOffice.org for free, legally. You can't compete with free, especially at $500 a pop.

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[Duhavid]

In case you were asking a serious question...

On the Microsoft hatred topic...why the heck is there so much anti-microsoft sentiments

I started out liking Microsoft. My disaffect grew out of seeing the
installer for Windows ( I think 3.1 ) tell me that the OS/2 install that
I had on my machine was something I should remove cause it was just
taking up space. The wording was something I recall as being very
likely for someone unexperienced to decide to remove it. The years
of hearing from Microsoft that their products where enterprise ready,
when they just were not. The Stac and Novell DR Dos issues were not
handled with honor, in my opinion. The 94 consent decree, all but
ignored. The issue of coercing OEM's into the "pay for a license for
every machine that leaves the building, or pay more, regardless of
what is actually on the machine" ( how can the "free market" decide in
the face of a built in price step like that ). All the nonsense about
"this is about removing our ability to innovate" on the last round
of anti trust legal wrangling. Running Netscape out of business for
the most part, then having the gall to say that the aquisition of Netscape
by AOL was proof that there was plenty of freedom and competition. The
decision to embed IE deeper into the system, a stupid decision, excepting
for how it allowed them to manipulate things legally. Microsoft's talk
of innovation, but constantly seeing others break trail, only to have
Microsoft come in later and "take their lunch" ( then complaining about
Google taking their lunch, when the only reason there is competition
between Google and Microsoft, is because Microsoft decided to enter
Google's market niche. Which brings me to the point of Microsoft seeming
to need to enter every niche in existance, to make it so that Microsoft
is the only company left standing ( yeah, they havent succeeded, but it
isnt because they havent tried ). The reduction of innovation that the
preceeding point brings ( yeah, I'm going to invest in your startup,
but first, how are you going to keep Microsoft from taking it all from
you, if you prove this is a winner ). All the hoopla about Microsoft
innovating, when the real effect is the opposite. I could go on, but
I think I have hit the high notes.

Hate them? No, not really. But I dont like them, nor the effect that they
have had. No, that effect has not been 100% bad, but it could have been
so much better.

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[Fullhazard]

The reason everyone hates microsoft is precisely because they're giving away a product that normally costs 500$.

They've built a business model out of charging ridiculous amounts of money for products that aren't worth the installation media they're printed on, and forcing better products to take the back seat.

To put it another way: I wouldn't buy office at full price. I wouldn't buy office for 1.50$. Hell, I wouldn't even download office for free, because better programs exist.

A bag full of shit that's discounted 500$ isn't a deal.
On a side note, my Captcha word is ironically 'retail'

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[EvanED]

Hell, I wouldn't even download office for free, because better programs exist.

What?

I ask that in all seriousness, at least for Word. I haven't used Word Perfect since it came with one of those strips you put above your function keys that told you what they all did alone, with alt, with ctrl, and with shift because there weren't menus because it was a curses-like interface with no mouse. So it's possible that it's better. But is there anything else? Really? (And don't say OO Writer or I'll toss my head back laughing. OO is a fine project and improving faster than Office is, but in a couple areas that are important to me, they're still at least a version behind the version of Office uses, which is in turn two versions behind the current beta. So there's a bit of catching up to do. Maybe v.3. Here's hoping.)

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason everyone hates microsoft is precisely because they're giving away a product that normally costs 500$.

Hear that everybody? You need to start charging for Linux, Open Office, Firefox, etc. so people won't hate you.

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[froggero1]

What exaclly do you miss with using OO.o? I have been using Neooffice for the last year now, and OpenOffice for the year before that, and I have never ran into anything that I couldn't do. I don't get the hate against OO... is it a feature that you'd like? Maybe a certain aspect of the interface that bugs you?

Or maybe it's because it doesn't say "Microsoft" on it to match your "start menu".

-windows free since '03

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[drsquare]

What exaclly do you miss with using OO.o?

I miss my computer not grinding to a halt for a minute when it opens up.

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[akac]

Free does not mean its any good. Open Office is great for some people, but for people who rely on the software, have to track changes for legal documents and work with contracts - its useless.

I use Word for one reason only - as a business owner I get contracts that are marked up with Word's Track Changes feature and I need to see those.

So free is useless if it does not meet requirements. Free is great when it does (Apache/Linux/Adium and a thousand other things)

Re:Why do you all hate microsoft?

[EvanED]

Hmm, in one of these discussions I had I think four feature shortfalls that I had run into with things that I use, but I can only think of two of them now, as it's been a while sice I used OO. (My Word use is also declining as I do more in LaTeX. Which, BTW, while better than Word in many respects, doesn't come close to being a replacement; it's in too much a different category to say that.)

The first is the quality of the track changes feature. This is what I was referring to with the versions in my last post. In Word 2000 and before, and in OO, deleting text turns it red and strikethrough. From Word 2002, it removes the deleted text and puts it in a bubble in the margin, with a marker pointing to where it was removed from. The latter strategy not just is a lot more aesthetically appealing, but also gives a correct impression of what the modified version will look like. The older strategy -- OO's strategy -- disrupts line breaks, pagenation, etc. because the deleted text isn't actually removed and still takes up space. On a few occasions I've used the track changes feature as somewhat of a non-linear undo method. I'd turn it on, remove a few things in different areas of the paper, then decide that I wanted something I deleted in the middle restored, so I could just right click and choose to reject the change. When stuff like the length of the document matters (as it does for many school papers) you can't use the older method to do it.

The second thing I miss is an equivalent of either Word's normal mode or the ability to collapse the top and bottom margins in page view. I often find myself changing to normal mode or collapsing the margins because the spaces between the bottom of the text on page i and the top of the text on i+1 is distracting or causes me to not be able to fit as much on the screen at once.

The other comments I have are about the interface. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the location of Format->Page. (Where you set margins and stuff.) I agree that it makes a lot more sense to put it there rather than File->Page Setup if you consider it by itself, but when most other programs that have an equivalent put it at File->Page Setup, I dunno. I'm not gonna begrudge them this though, but it did cause a bit of hunting the first time I wanted to change margins. The other thing is that on Windows, the controls seem just a bit off. It feels like I'm using something like a Qt application trying to mimic the host OS look but not using native controls. If it isn't using native controls, then it is just a tiny bit off, and if it is (as I've heard), they're doing something a little weird with them. (Maybe owner drawing the menus for instance to put the icons there.) I can't quite put my finger on the difference between it and a native app, but it's a bit disconcerting. The other thing is I like the Word approach of using the sidebar for, say, the styles bar instead of a separate window like OO uses, because it ensures that it won't cover the document and will readjust the zoom of the document when you open and close the sidebar if you have it on fit width.

Like I said, OO is getting better, and I'd like to see that continue. I don't know if I have the coding skills and I certainly don't have the time to actually help contribute, but I have at least gone and voted on a few feature requests on their bugtracker. (In case any one is curious or has the same wishes I do, issue 23465 is a stepping-stone towards the track changes wish, 4914 is normal mode, 6191 is another big track changes improvement letting you right click on changes to accept or reject them (I had forgotten about that!), 35088 is another small thing I ran into once (I had to fill out an application using one of these forms; I was in Gentoo at the

This doesn't make a lot of sense

[Millenniumman]

I don't really have a problem with it, but it seems pointless. The article talks about bandwidth costs, but how much can $1.00 help? If it was a small shareware company, sure, but Microsoft, who loses money on every XBox? If it was $5-10, it would be useful to filter out people who aren't really going to beta test the software, just maybe open it up. $1.00 isn't any worse than the 15 pages of "signing up" (at least for Vista). $1.00 is hardly worth getting a credit card out for.

Re:This doesn't make a lot of sense

[Ohreally_factor]

it's the tubes. They have to buy new tubes so they can send you an internet. Trucks just won't do. They're expensive and highly inefficient.

Yea but

[IlliniECE]

Thats like paying to participate in a drug trial

This doesn't seem particuarly evil.

[enosys]

I don't think Microsoft is being particularly evil here. If anything they're being pretty nice offering a free Vista beta and an almost free Office beta. For example, did Apple give out free Tiger betas? $1.50 isn't much. I first thought it was kind of ridiculous to bother charging that but then I noted the article says the beta has been downloaded 3 million times so far so it'll certainly add up.

The one thing that bothers me about this is that they haven't considered P2P. They say the price is to offset the cost of downloading from their servers. Well, why don't they offer the beta via BitTorrent for free and just charge for downloading from their servers? I reallize their cost still wouldn't be zero per download but it should be quite small and acceptable.

Re:This doesn't seem particuarly evil.

[Enderandrew]

I agree. People seem hell bent on twisting and villianizing every single action of Microsoft. But this move seems reasonable to me.

Re:This doesn't seem particuarly evil.

[joe 155]

well they wouldn't want to allow P2P downloading because Vista likes to actively stop people from using these things. If you thought that you told your computer what to do you are dead wrong. On the forum I use most one member encountered a fairly interesting problem, being that Vista was checking what he was downloading and when something seemed like it might not be legal they had his interent connection stopped... lovely.

You can read the e-mail he got from them at the thread here; http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=117 936&page=1&pp=15

Re:This doesn't seem particuarly evil.

[EvanED]

Did you even read that thread? He didn't say it was, he said he suspected it might be. No one came up with a definitive answer. To be honest, Occam's razor tells me that it probably wasn't vista...

Re:This doesn't seem particuarly evil.

[joe 155]

well in the thread was a link to an interesting article by RMS, in which he was making suggestions that this type of thing would be common with "[un-]trusted computing", but it is also interesting to note that the site he got directed to was go.microsoft so they obviously had something to do with it. Whilst there is no definate proof I feel confident that Vista was pretty much at the centre of it, why would it only happen the one time he used Vista? why never with any others? why MS's site? how did they know the file name/size? (I'll accept that it *might* be possible for the ISP to know that but I doubt they'd log it or care)...

It all seems a little like Vista was at the heart of this, if only it was open source, then people would be able to say definitavely either way, but until then I still think that it was Vista, and I think Occam might agree

Re:This doesn't seem particuarly evil.

[Tony Hoyle]

Of course once trusted computing takes hold you won't even be able to download unsigned binaries (signed by verisign of course.. nice little earner for them.. they already enforced this restriction on device drivers).

Beta 3

[wiresquire]

And beta 3 will cost $450 rrp. It's just they will forget to add the Beta 3 to the name and accidentally send it out to the stores

Big deal, happens too for Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

My roomate once payed $20 for a "Linux Preview" at Best Buy. I don't recall anyone here getting too upset about that. Wonder why. Can you spell h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y?

For what it's worth....

[rts008]

At least now they are calling their product a beta, and finally charging what it's worth.

But it still is not as much of a bargain as OpenOffice.

Re:For what it's worth....

[bwalling]

But it still is not as much of a bargain as OpenOffice.

Hate MS all you want, but MS Office is easily worth $1.50 more than OpenOffice.

Full circle...

[mlow82]

In the good ol' days, lesser-known start up companies would pay beta testers for their valuable input.

In recent years, people could beta-test software (such as GMail, Windows, and IE7) for free.

Now we are paying to become the beta-testers!!

Re:Full circle...

[Fullhazard]

No, that's only half-circle. Full circle would be getting back to the good way, where people are paid for their time.

Although, to be fair, going full circle is a good way to describe windows.
10: Programs are slow, because only slow processors exist, and buggy, because there isn't adequate testing time for the OS.
while(microsoftHasNoCompetition()){
20: Bugs get fixed, processors speed up, and everyone is happy.
30: Microsoft releases new OS. OS uses more cpu, slowing down the system, and despite having a monopoly and no competitors, rushes the system out the door (although it's 9 months late), and 9 zero-day (literally) exploits come out.
}
Personally, I would rather have the next windows be like Duke Nukem Forever, and spend 10 years in development but not be rushed, but that isn't going to happen, because MS really needs the extra untold billions that releasing a new OS (even though it isn't better than the old os) will bring.

Re:Full circle...

[DavidD_CA]

It's supply and demand. There used to be very few people qualified enough to beta test. Over time, that number has grown exponentially. Now it is at the point where people *want* to beta test and in some cases are willing to pay for that opportunity.

For me it's not about hunting bugs, it's about being educated.

Because I want to stay on top of my game, and tell my clients what to expect with the next round of software, I'd be willing to pay, too.

Re:Full circle...

[mobby_6kl]

Professional testers are still being paid to provide their valuable input. The main reason MS started charging for the Office beta is to get rid of all the wankers who'll download it just to show their friends how cool they are, and MS certainly won't be missing those types.

Re:Full circle...

[Richard_at_work]

Full circle? Hardly, I remember there being a hooha about Win 98 beta testers who paid (I think) $19.99 for a copy not getting discounts on the final release. So this isnt new.

Re:Full circle...

[noidentity]

I think you mean half-circle.

Re:Full circle...

[PhrostyMcByte]

Hmm? The Office beta is still under private testing - and testers get it for free. They are there to provide input. I'm sure people using the public release can provide input but I doubt Microsoft ever intended it as more of a preview to get people talking.

Re:Full circle...

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded it but just can't get it to run under Linux. I click on setup.exe but it just will not run! What the hell are they thinking? ;)

Bandwidth costs eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

ed2k://|file|OPPLUS-EN.EXE|461881224|C57D05B6DFDBF 0CC07A5F31382A9045F|p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|/

Bill != Micro$oft

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, Bill Gates might be a cool guy. Heck, looking at all the money he throws out from the foundation for useful things isnt bad at all.

Microsoft is a corporation, though. Sure, Bill is at the head of the corporate tree, but there are a lot of other movers and shakers at the top as well. As a whole, /. seems to not like corporations, especially large ones with granted monopolies who have been known to abuse their corporate position on a regular basis.

Fines

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, they need to pay for those EU fines somehow :)

It's not the bandwidth

[ShooterNeo]

The real cost here is not the bandwidth. The reason Microsoft is charging a fee is to greatly reduce the number of people who download the beta. Why do they want fewer beta testers? Because every bug report a beta tester sends in HAS TO BE LOOKED AT IN SOME WAY. Granted, there's automated tools so that if a particular bug leaves a certain memory signature, they can avoid looking at the thousands and thousands of identical reports of the same bug. And, Microsoft has one of the largest information worker staffs in the world.

Despite what we say about them, however, Microsoft is still a group of professionals. Before releasing a product, they have to make a list of every known bug and decide that every bug still in the program on release is not important enough to fix. They have to view every bug report. They are probably overwhelmed right now.

OSS

[Borgschulze]

Why not just use OpenOffice.org... It's fast, stable, reliable, and free, and it supports all the Microsoft Office formats.

Re:OSS

[GFree]

it supports all the Microsoft Office formats

Should read "sorta supports all the Microsoft Office formats". While it does a good job for many documents, some others get mangled or have things misaligned, missing, etc. A lot of people won't allow the compromise and will demand nothing less than full compatibility.

We've had this discussion a thousand times already. People won't just move to OpenOffice.org because you say so.

Re:OSS

[Borgschulze]

I have, and so should everyone else. I demand everyone move to Open Office.

Re:OSS

[Wierdy1024]

I'm going to be modded to oblivion for this, but:

it's got a horid interface mimicing office 97
it always seems to be one step behind in the office suite race
it's compatibility is good, but not good enough with office files
it has the open source "feel" - a slow responding ui (feels like java!), dialogs designed by programmers, not ui experts, and quite a lot of bugs or quirks.
what about all my marcos written with custom activeX controls and vbscript that won't run in it.

oh yeah, and for enterprise it doesn't have intergration with all those MS server technologies, and no proper support.

I can see that some people on a budget like it, but other than price I don't think it can compete in most other areas.

Action Pack

[DavidD_CA]

It should be noted that subscribers of MSDN and Action Pack were recently shipped DVDs for Office 2006 and Vista, as part of their subscription.

Prepare a serious document

[AnEmbodiedMind]

For a lot of tasks I prefer LaTex, but here are some things I've used that weren't on your list, and these aren't crazy way out minority user features:

Tables (and their formatting)
Styles
Equations
indentation
Hyperlinks
headers
footers
watermarks
embedded objects from other apps
Document metadata (author etc.)
Columns
Margins
Page orientation
Borders
line Spacing
Table of contents
End notes
Add comments
Track changes

Now putting all of those features, plus the ones in your list, and some power features for people like Mail Merge etc. and you've got a complicated UI.

The new version tries to make all those features more accessible by ditching the pure toolbar and menu models that had collapsed under that feature weight.

Office 12 is easier to use than Open office, AND it has more features.

Re:Prepare a serious document

[Recurve Boy]

For those who want to use Tex but don't want to do it the hard way (I recall that marking up maths was rather tedious and difficult to read sometimes) there is Lyx! I also like the concept of a "document processor". http://www.lyx.org/ http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/LyXOnMac?from=LyX.Mac

Alright... I'll pay the $1.50

[xLittleP]

But I want a discount when I buy the retail version, dammit!

what a rip off!

[kbox]

They are paying us just $1.50 to beta test their software for them? Oh, wait. I didn't read that right.

Seriously, A buck 50 is the kinda thing the homeless are supposed to ask for, Not MS.

Beta testing.

[babbling]

Let's set so double the killer delete select all.

Why pay?

[Klaidas]

First, I would like to say that 1.5$ isn't much to pay for software. But...
Aren't we actually helping Microsoft by using their beta products? Doesn't Microsoft read reviews of their software and then try to make it better? (I know this last sentence sounds silly, but I mean things like Vista's user permision system, etc)
If we help them, they should pay US! Of course, that is never going to happen, but they should at least allow to test for free and then thanks us.
On the other hand, their software was free for sime time, and Vista's beta still is.
If they have bandwidth problems, isn't it time to learn from free sofware and set up some mirrors? Sheeesh, even paid software like GetRight has them!

Re:Why pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then maybe you aren't actually helping MS? Maybe the average beta tester just creates more work for MS as they submit duplicate bugs. There is a point of diminishing returns, and I'm pretty sure it was breached around download #1,000,000. Perhaps this is microsoft's way of acknoledging that returns have actually dipped below zero.

I just don't get it

[pembo13]

People complain that they rather Windows over OSS based OSes because of the regular need to contribute bug reports, etc. Yet people are willing to (regardless of the magnitude of the cost) to beta test a program which if they like they will have to pay for again, despite that in all likelyhood they already have an older version of the program, which they already paid for? But using a free product, and contributing to it (also for free) is too much of a hassel?

New Business model?

[Elektroschock]

Charging for bug hunting. Not bad. Microsoft sells hunting permissions. A business idea for the future.

Re:New Business model?

[BCW2]

What's new about it? Every product M$ puts out for sale is actually a beta. That is their business model, charge everyone to be a beta tester. They have been charging for bug hunts for years. I wonder if M$ will ever release a charlie of anything.

to semi quote bill gates from the simpsons:

[Anonymous Coward]

'you don't think i became the richest man in the world by writing out cheques (checks to some) did you? hahaha!'

at which point he overturns the desk, thus 'buying out' the company

So...

[jrothwell97]

Microsoft charge you to hunt down bugs in their software. As opposed to Linux where it's free and you may even get paid. Thanks, Bill.

Re:

[rbarreira]

I don't understand why you thought about that... What the hell does it have to do with this article??

Re: Mindsets

[TaoPhoenix]

I disagree. I clearly separate OSS from "pirated". I will try my best to get OSS stuff to work, because it's a member of the class of software that made Micro$oft wake up and grudgingly admit they'd better tie their hopes to Windows, and not MS Office at $400 a snap.

I won't "freshly" copy MS software, because in corporations, it's too easy to get snared in some weird trap when HR on a bad day learns of it. At work, they spend more on coffee than Microsoft office.

For personal use, I use Wordpad, OpenOffice Calc, and free email from yahoo.

If I had a monster text file to process, I'd flip it to work to "Borrow" MS Word, do some quick formatting, and flip it home again.

I wonder if they submitted a patent for this, too?

[Dcnjoe60]

I was just wondering if Microsoft submitted the concept of charging your beta testers to the patent office like they did for using advertising instead of charging fees. Wait, I've got it! How about if the beta copies of Office have advertising imbeded in them! Then, Microsoft could give still allow testers to have them for free!

Re:$1.50? Personal data

[Nikademus]

How would you pay? To pay, you will have to give you CC number or so, that means MS gets your personal data and knows who downloaded it.
$1.5 is cheap, but you give them all your data, which is worth much more than $1.5.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

*shrugs* Why should I care about a non-event?

[golodh]

Really? Why should I care?

I don't need to spend my time with Microsoft's beta releases (there's no critical need in my work that they address), and I'll see it when it's fully released and my employer's IT department rolls it out. So ... what's in it for me?

And on my home machine I don't have Office ... I'm happily using Open Office. No hassle with licenses, it's free, and it runs on both Linux and Windows.

So err ... to me this is a bit of a non-event really. How about you?

The most annoying thing is the OEM endorsements

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever seen a website or magazine ad for Dell or any of the other OEM providers? They all say "[Insert company here] recommends Windows [version]".

The ONLY REASON they say that, is that they are REQUIRED to by Microsoft in the contract to sell OEM versions of Windows. I've seen ridiculous incarnations of it: "Alienware recommends Windows XP". "IBM recommends Windows XP" (on a pricing page for an x86 Linux box).

How about this one (warning, PDF): "Lenovo recommends Windows XP Professional." right above a picture of a Brazillian football star.

Do you think these companies really give a **** what you run on your box? Of course not. Microsoft forced them all to put that endorsement in their customer-facing stuff. Because the message is coming from so many different companies, it probably succeeds in misleading large numbers of gullible users into thinking that Windows is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Does it run on Linux?

[botik32]

Does it run on Linux? Because if it doesn't, MS Office is not worth 1 cent to me.

And in other news

[ShimmyShimmy]

And when asked how the new platform differs from previous versions of Office, Microsoft declined to comment.

Re:

[celotil]

I don't understand why you thought about that... What the hell does it have to do with this article??

I thought perhaps for a moment I should have read the whole article, but after reading it just a moment ago and seeing what the "test drive" is, I'm still on-topic as far as I can see.

It's pretty simple really. Microsoft has been thinking about using micropayments for Microsoft Live and the XBox - lots of links on google with "microsoft micropayments" (minus the quotes) showing that they're thinking a lot about it.

Now lets say, purely for example, that you're running a software business that is well known for releasing software that is late, has more than it's share of bugs considering how much the company hypes it, and has a bad reputation in the IT industry for lapse security and frequently generating problems for your customers.

Ordinarily you'd expect that software company to go belly up rather quickly, but due to carefully drafted contracts and well-handled deals with hardware manufacturers, most of the market is using your software. They're bitching about it, but they're still using it.

What's a way of improving your image without actually losing anything? Give-aways would help, but you're already in trouble for monopoly actions, and give-aways would just get you into more trouble. Charge less for the software? Maybe, but the stockholders wouldn't like that.

This is where the micropayments come in, and this is where this $1.50 download/cd charge comes from.

Office 2007 isn't even a commercial release yet. It's Beta, and given that a lot of MS software is usually regarded as Beta quality when it hits the shelves, this must therefore be less than Beta, perhaps Alpha and a bit.

If you were running Microsoft, and you could get people to actually pay for unfinished software, people who actually suspect that it's going to be broken, imagine how much you could charge people who don't know anything about computers, who don't know how software works?

The "noobs" understand counting, and less money in their pocket is a bad thing, but what if they didn't see it as paying full price?

Windows XP Pro can be had for AU$200 off the shelf. Even if someone who doesn't understand computers sees that, and understands that they've got Windows on their new Dell machine, they think they've got a good deal.

They may only spend $36.00 over two years in monthly micropayments - dressed up as security care or some shit -, and they'll still think they got a good deal - it's not $200 right? It's still $36.00 though.

Let's say the person buys Windows for $49.95, because they already have a computer, and then pays the monthly micropayments for two years, they're paying $85.95. Not bad compared to full price, but what if they keep using XP for 4 years? $121.95.

What if both customers use XP for 4 years? $72.00 + 121.95 = $193.95

Now what would be a good estimated ratio of pre-built machines with Windows already on them to sealed copies of Windows that are sold each month? 3 pre-builts to 1 sealed copy? 4? I don't know, but I doubt that there's an equal ratio of pre-built machines to home builders and new updates bought from the shop.

If you can get people who know how you work to give you money, what's to stop you getting money off those who don't know?

"Yeah but, it's just a $1.50."

Paid by how many people?

"Your making a strawman argument! You have no idea what MS is doing. They're not testing micropayments."

Hey, I could be wrong, most probably am, but I tell you what, I certainly wouldn't pay to download or buy a CD of software from MS that's actually labeled as Beta. I've had enough experience with their products in the past to know not to touch anything that can't be patched with at least two major service packs when you install it.

Goddammit you are all worthless nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Bored IT people with a skewed vision of the world? Wow!

I don't want you anywhere near me.

Re: Mindsets

[LiquidCoooled]

Lets use your example of Wordpad (commercial closed source but bundled as essentially free software), suppose you notice a bug in it that hasn't been fixed or a workaround hasn't been posted.
Would you go to the trouble of informing Microsoft about it and hoping there is a way to do it, or would you just search the web for another editor?

I hazard that most people will just get another editor and infact keep trying a few until they found another one to be their default.
Now, suppose one of those editors that you found that was just right was commercial and you paid your £20 or whatever for it.
If you then found a different bug in it, the chances are you would notify the creator and attempt to get a fix for it.

If it was open source, sure if you were skilled enough you could attempt to fix it yourself, but most people aren't so they would just move onto another new editor.

My boss falls into the bracket of former developer, he still understands logic and the flow of the code but hasn't got it in him to code it all up now.

As for myself, I like OSS and have invested my own time into fixing bugs (firefox addins mainly) and helping others out.

./ should charge $.50 per post!

[Anonymous Coward]

that will definitely help with the -1, 0, and 1 posts, eh?

MICROSOFT RUNNING OUT OF MONEY, GATES TOOK IT ALL

[sanman2]

I think that Microsoft sees the waterfall drop looming at the end of the river not so far away. They know that Vista will be a flop, and they're scrambling to start sucking in the revenues as quickly as they can. Soon they'll be charging for basic hotmail and for MSNBC, if things keep going like this.

No wonder Gates has decided to gracefully bow out and go into his charity work fulltime. He knows his days of pirating other peoples' ideas are over. There's nothing left to pirate. They already pirated windows from the Mac, pirated Xbox from Playstation, pirated Internet Explorer from Netscape, pirated Word from Wordperfect, pirated Excel from Lotus, etc.

Now there's nothing left to pirate. Unless they can develop Grey Goo to digest the planet, there isn't anything more they can find to pirate. They're headed to Davy Jones' locker.

Best MS Word feature in the Universe ever:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Highlight your text
2) Right-click highlighted text and choose 'Font'
3) Select the "Text Effects" tab
4) Select "Sparkle Text"
5) Win!
6) wtf, MS. w.t.f.

In all seriousness, although most any desktop publishing is going to use different applications, there are plenty of features in Word that help a lot with making documents that don't look like crap Times New that everyone else in your cube farm churns out...Styles and Formatting, I'm looking at you. I just appreciate the features because improving the formatting and appearance of my documents was the only way to get my work noticed while I was an intern...even though I worked in the design department, everyone churned out their presentation documentation using either standard Times New with ALL CAPS for sub-headings or the pre-packaged templates which didn't actually suit their specific needs. If I dropped in an Arial Black title and subheadings and other consistent formatting, my hard work got attention. (The downside being that I was then in charge of compiling and presenting documention on every project I worked on).

And I like word count...but if I try to copy/paste from my web browser one more time and my firewall says that Office is trying to go to the Internet for whatever reason...straight to the moon, Office! Straight to the moon!

-dn

MSFT Not in Business to Advertise BT

[Anonymous Coward]

you think msft wants *more* people to learn about bitorrent?

NOT!

as usual, they put their interests first.

actually, their interests are the only ones on the list.

Re: Wordpad

[TaoPhoenix]

Conceptually, of you are of course correct. I am fully aware that Wordpad is free as in Beer, not as in Speech. Since I am also aware that its sole use is ugly hack documenting, I expect nothing from it.

When I find some time and energy, I *should* find an alternate friendly editor and load it onto all four machines. Mostly, I considered the lack of direct revenue not given to Microsoft sufficient for the moment.

Charge for Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that companies used to reward beta testers ...

Re: Charging for Betas

[TaoPhoenix]

There seemed to be a Duplicate version of this story on Aug 1, but then apparently someone noticed and removed it, so I am "moving along" to here.

That brief newer version had something about Microsoft's surprise at the number of downloads, with the "need to cover costs." The first 8 replies expressed incerdulity, and added one word: Torrent.

Re:MICROSOFT RUNNING OUT OF MONEY, GATES TOOK IT A

[Fordiman]

Just for accuracy, pirated windows from Xerox.