Upgrade prices were mysteriously absent from Microsoft’s Office 2010 pricing information, which they revealed last week. The upgrade versions of Office have been removed in an attempt to simplify the purchase process for customers, but sadly, it only makes matters more complicated. Simplification -you’re doing it wrong.
Ars Technica contacted Microsoft to ask for a clarification about the lack of upgrade copies for Office 2010, and this is the answer they got from the Redmond software giant:
“We are not offering upgrade pricing for Office 2010,” a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed with Ars, “Based on partner and customer feedback we’ve made many changes to the Office 2010 line-up designed to simplify the product line-up and pricing in the retail space. Removing version upgrades was one of those decisions. This reduces the number of products that our retail partners need to manage and also reduces customer confusion about which version of Office they should purchase.”
This seems like a straightforward answer: take the upgrade option away, and customers can only pick a full retail copy. Of course, this does mean customers have to pay more to upgrade to the new version of Office, but while that sucks for us, it’s a good thing for Microsoft’s bottom line.
Luckily, though, Microsoft does allow us to save money when buying Office 2010, and sadly, their idea of simplification kind of falls apart right here. Each Office 2010 SKU will come in two variants: Full Packaged Product (FPP) and Product Key Card (PKC). The former is self-explanatory, but the latter is not. A PKC version is just a license, so it doesn’t come with installation media. You can download the trial version and unlock it with a PKC, or you can use the media from a FPP (from a friend or whatever, that doesn’t matter).
Yes, Full Packaged Product and Product Key Card are totally simpler than full and upgrade.
I’m not really into using these internet-isms on OSAlert, but I can’t think of anything else.
Simplification fail.
Personally, I’ve never understood upgrade pricing.
Eliminating upgrade pricing means relatively higher prices for loyal Microsoft customers, but relatively lower prices for prospective Microsoft customers. That seems like a logical thing if you’re trying to grow market share.
Also, I wouldn’t be too cynical about treating this as a “price hike”; Office in particular has lowered prices in recent years and introduced lower cost versions (eg Home and Student which doesn’t require proof of studentship, licensed for three PCs, etc.)
Upgrade pricing is suppose to encourage customer loyalty by rewarding them with cheaper prices when updating from one version to another. That’s all there is to it, and this has paid off handsomely for Microsoft over the years.
Not sure I follow you there. Removing the upgrade pricing effectively means everyone that doesn’t have a volume license subscription will have to pay full price when moving from one version to the next.
Granted, a lot of people have been doing the whole get one version, skip a version or two, then upgrade. So it will not affect 100% of customers using a current or older version any way – but it does mean a price hike for those that did upgrade on the upgrade cycle every time, or nearly every time.
FYI – Upgrade pricing was usually around 50-60% of the full price, at least with Microsoft; though that has been climbing over the last few product releases.
Lowered? In 1997 I got a Full Version of Office 1997 Professional for $199, OEM. In 2008 we got my wife of Office 2007 Professional for over around $350-$400, OEM.[1] Microsoft has done anything but lower prices in the last few years.
Also, that Home and Student version is still over $100, and doesn’t even compare with what came in my Office 1997 Professional, missing a lot of the reason to use get the suite to start with.
That said, I’ve happily moved to OpenOffice myself. My wife has MS Office only so she can be more familiar with it for work and her studies towards her CPA. (If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have let her.)
[1] My wife saw the sticker shock of Microsoft products when we bought her laptop. With Windows (Ultimate) or Office (Professional) it would have cost us about $1200; with, it cost about $2000.
Actually, they have nothing to do with each other.
Product Key Card is a green project. They want to limit production of the boxes and media that might go to waste if unsold. I support the idea. You can download free software, and the same now applies to proprietary software, too. I see nothing bad about this.
I don’t see how this has anything to do with upgrades. They don’t offer upgrades any more. End of story.
Do you really believe that?
Product Key Card is so people can buy netbooks in the knowledge that they can still get MS Office. It’s part of the attack against Linux on netbooks.
You mean they are trying to compete? Imagine that.
//It’s part of the attack against Linux on netbooks. //
Not much of an attack needed, Linux is killing itself on netbooks because it sucks balls.
“Linux is killing itself on netbooks because it sucks balls.”
Man, Linux is stable, it can also suck balls. Win-win situation, why don’t people get Linux on their netbook/s, it has nothing but advantages.
You see, that could be used to try to prove the point that those using windows, obviously, have no balls to keep up with Linux!
Now, just to be precise: I don’t really mean it, I just think the cue was too damn good to miss the joke. Now I apologize
Edited 2010-01-13 06:20 UTC
The disadvantage it has is that it’s not as good as Windows on running Windows-only applications.
Personally? Of course I run Linux!
“The disadvantage it has is that it’s not as good as Windows on running Windows-only applications”
I know it’s probobly not you, but this sort of ‘argumentation’ is just freakin` hilarious.
Do we expect Windows to run Unix apps? of course we don’t! Why? because ot is an outrageous demand and noone has to do it – and vice-versa.
Plus – I use many OSs and *I really prefer unix apps over win-apps*! it’s free, less buggy and more intuitive. I can also port it, change it, etc.
There’s no Win app that could made me stick with Windows.
You’re right of course, but nonetheless I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason that so many run Windows on their netbooks. That, and that it’s that that’s what they are used to.
Now THAT is a statement!
Those versions with just a license have been around for years as System Builder. So nothing new here except for some dude talking crap.
Edited 2010-01-13 06:24 UTC
Mine doesn’t – I wonder what hardware your using and where you purchased it? Possibly you could put a clip on youtube?
I can guarantee there would be a considerable market for a Linux that sucks balls and it would be sold with the appropriate hardware from many site on the net
Is every action Microsoft takes an attack against Linux?
Linux (whether you definite it as a kernel or operating system distribution with lots of software) doesn’t even compete directly with an office suite, although many distributions include one. OpenOffice.org competes with MS Office. And one could run MS Office on Linux, or OpenOffice.org on Windows.
Is every action Microsoft takes an attack against Linux?
Almost always. The exceptions are when they make an attack against Apple or the likes of IBM.
Close but not quite…
That’s not quite a delusion of persecution… more like the delusion that anyone would care enough to persecute you. Microsoft doesn’t need to attack Linux, they can just leave it alone to wallow in their own irrelevancy.
There is a Windows build of OpenOffice. It doesn’t benefit from most of it’s libraries being loaded during boot the way MS Office does but OO.org is very much available and running natively on Windows along with the multitude of other supported platforms.
Office libraries don’t load on boot for any reasonably modern version of Office. (I think Office 95 used to do that, but more modern versions do not).
The Office team just works hard on their startup time, so it’s pretty good. No conspiracy behind that.
That may be, I don’t know the intimate details of how the Office dev team works. My understanding is based on a clean Windows and Office install where the office app will load nice and quick with barely a RAM increase. Based on it using already loaded IE as the app widget set and Office specific libraries loaded during boot, this would make sense. One only sees the resource use really increase when opening the files and there by adding into the resource blob.
Office doesn’t use IE for its widget set, and IE files are not loaded at boot either except through the generic superfetch mechanism that applies to all applications running on Windows.
The reason Office loads pretty quickly is that the team has worked hard to ensure that the minimum amount of stuff is loaded on the critical startup path and that the code and data for features are generally pulled in only when each particular feature is used. The Word and Excel folks in particular have done a good job.
This is not correct.
Windows itself takes ages to boot, especially AFTER the desktop first appears, and the reason is that Windows is pre-loading the most often used application libraries. The feature that does this on Windows7 and Vista is called Superfetch, and on Windows XP it was called Prefetch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies#SuperFe…
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/superfetch….
The equivalent program on Linux is called preload. I don’t know if Mac OSX has such a feature or not.
If you want to compare application load times of different OS desktops, then you must ensure that like features are enabled.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 both run a program called Superfetch. This program is meant to pre-load the most often used libraries of desktop applications, and it is part of the reason why Windows takes such a comparitively long time to boot.
Superfetch is supposed to be agnostic … which is to say that it should have no bias. If you use OpenOffice.org often, it is supposed to pre-load those libraries, but if you use MS Office often, it is supposed to pre-load those. This means that OpenOffice and MS Office should get the same benefit from Superfetch, and the application load times should be quite similar. After all, both MS Office and OpenOffice are large programs.
Certainly, if I enable the equivalent-to-Superfetch functionality on Linux, which is called pre-load, I can get OpenOffice.org to load on Linux in a similar time to what MS Office loads on the same machine under Windows.
So, if you are NOT getting a similar result when using Windows alone (i.e if MS Office loads on Windows far quicker than OpenOffice loads on Windows) then there are two possibilities:
(1) You have not trained Superfetch. You have always used MS Office, so Superfetch will pre-load those libraries. You have installed OpenOffice as a trial but rarely use it, so Superfetch will not pre-load the libraries for openOffice. This will result in you seeing a significant disparity between the apparent application load times of MS Office and OpenOffice.
(2) Perhaps Superfetch is NOT unbiased, and Microsoft have programmed it to prefer to pre-load MS application libraries ahead of libraries from other vendor’s applications.
Which explanation do you prefer?
Edited 2010-01-13 22:23 UTC
Which explanation one prefers is not as important as which explanation is correct.
Thank you for the details though. It’s good to have the technical basis for comparison rather than raw speculative observation.
(I think I just broke my big word quota for the day)
Quick, hide better hide any evidence of the “quick loader” background application that was enabled by default in StarOffice and OpenOffice for years.
Why would a boxed license number have anything to do with a specific chassis? Are you suggesting that buying a boxed license means the software will magically apear on my netbook with only the license number fields left blank? If I use the boxed license number to validate Office on my desktop, will it magically uninstall itself?
I don’t see how a license pack (been selling them for years to big business) separate from a full software pack including install media has anything to do with one specific form factor. I’m willing to accept that I’m missing the leap of logic but I’m going to need you to clarify what that missing bit is.
Speaking of simplification fail, the HTML pointing to the article seems a little broken…
‘a hr=”http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/01/why-microsoft-killed-…‘ should be ‘a href=”…’
Unless they give me a free copy like they did with Office 2003, I guess I’ll be using that copy and OOo for the foreseeable future. Just like I’m still using XP along with Linux and OpenBSD.
Simplification = don’t give Ballmer any more money.
Besides that, I’ve had all the “simplification” I can take from Microsoft. They pretty much assume you are an idiot, making anything more than “duh, where’s the power button?” extra work — ostensibly to discourage you from poking your mouse where certain danger lurks. I was lamenting the other night how getting to my network card’s properties (to assign it a static IP address) is something like 6 clicks in Vista, as opposed to 2 or 3 in XP. And Word has condescended to users by hiding things from them for years (and I always wanted to take my best pair of dikes to ol’ Clippy).
But then, when their stuff breaks, oh boy, it takes a pretty damn knowledgeable person, armed with a broadband connection (to Google for the problem, of course), to fix it. I’m to the point where I’m recommending Macs to inexperienced or impatient computer users. And I don’t even own a Mac!
+1 – unless they give me a free copy, I won’t be considering it. Personally I found Office 2007 more complicated to use than 2003, so I switched back to OO. It works for me, and it doesn’t take 4 minutes walking around the menus to find some simple functions. You can call me stupid or inexperienced with Office, and you may be right
but I still find OO better suit my usage. Matter of choice though. And not to forget the ridiculous OOXML ISO standard, and especially the way it became standard – another reason not to use the MS product.
Thom, you might want to double check your link to ars. It’s not working
How about having two versions: Home and Corporate instead of having a lot of editions and no upgrades? That would be too logical for Microsoft, I guess.
They don’t seem to understand customers at all.
Edited 2010-01-13 12:10 UTC
Sigh, most business don’t need Access, InfoPath or other stuff. Again it’s focusing costs on certain products, that’s why we have choices. More choice is good. Biggest difference between FPP and PKC is that one gives you 2 licenses and other 1. So f–king simple, no need to complicate it by being smartass.
Or they offer the office components “a la carte” giving steeper discounts for the more components you buy. Simply pay for what you want to keep at or before the end of the trial period (giving you a key for future installs, of course). They’d have a MUCH better idea of how many people buy and use each office component that way.
Sure they could, but if they did that they wouldn’t be able to force customers to buy something they don’t need in order to get a product they do need. It’d hurt Microsoft’s bottom line to offer each office component peacemeal.
Subsidization, same crummy reason I get 3 ESPNs and 2 Home Shopping Network channels that I never ever watch with my cable TV package.
This reminds me of the “ADP” charge prominent on many popular car models before the recession hit. If pressed, some car dealers would admit that it stands for “Additional Dealer Profit”.
Maybe I’m missing something, but how is offering to sell software both with and without physical media either complicated or in any way a bad thing? Lots and lots of companies do this. If you download the software off their website you pay one price, if you order the software on a CD in a box with a printed manual you pay a higher price. I’ve always thought that this has been good thing, so why is it bad now?
As I mentioned a few times here, not a whole lot of folks buy Microsoft Office (or Windows for that matter). They either get it from work, buy a volume license, get an educational version (me, for a class that required it), or find a way to “borrow” it.
For those few that go out and buy Office, it’s a bummer, but I wouldn’t think it’s that many people. You can get it one of the ways I suggested above, start using the new “Online” version once it comes out, or just use OpenOffice (my normal choice).
When I bought my Gateway Laptop in 1998, I go Office Pro for about $50 as part of the purchase. I think the market was a little more open then. I think Windows 95 was only $79. Now that MS has captured the markets in OS and Office Suites, we see what happens.