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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. "
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. :-)
...they have been charging for betas (e.g. Windows XP Retail) for years!
http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3506152
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.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
I wanted to joke if microsoft wants to cover bandwidth charges.....but seems thats the real reason !!
FTFA:
Wincopy
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
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Microsoft needs to setup a torrent. Stop being a bunch of pussies and jump on the bandwagon MS!
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
"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.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
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>
Te Quiero, Puta!
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.
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.
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.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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.
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
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
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.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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!!
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.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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.
Why not just use OpenOffice.org... It's fast, stable, reliable, and free, and it supports all the Microsoft Office formats.
In Soviet Russia, Linux compiles you!
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.
-David
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.
But I want a discount when I buy the retail version, dammit!
When is Slashdot going to add a -1 moderation option for people who actually RTFA?
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.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
"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.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown