MS botches Office 2010 prices, hikes Professional by £30 Microsoft got its sums wrong on the price tag for the boxed version of Office Professional 2010, forcing it to hike the product by £30. The company revealed UK prices for its Office 2010 editions yesterday, but mistakenly priced the off-the-shelf Professional version to retail at £399.99. "Following the announcement on UK …
That is outrageous.
I know that is off the shelf but come on that is just silly. How can you justify that now? iWork (admittedly not as good) is just $80.
I think you have just lost yourself 130 licences, the only thing is Outlook, if I had a good alternative to that and could save in .DOC then I will be moving. I will actually be actively looking into it now.
WTF?
If it cost them a bazillion pounds to develop, with projected sales of something like 5 or 600 million, to recover their development costs & make a small profit, sales prices of 3 to 4 pounds a unit would be about right. If I'm a zero out, then 30 to 40 pounds.
Obscene.
It doesn't just have to recover it's development costs. It has to cover the entire cost of running the worlds largest software company because they are making fuck all elsewhere. All those loss leading xboxes. All those xbox returns. All that Vista and Win7 crap that only get a few dollars from OEM prices 'cause nobody was stupid enough to buy it off the shelf. All that 'We will buy company 'x' and make ourselves king of business opportunity 'y'". Zune FFS. Big business and government using the threat of Linux to negotiate huge discounts.
They have been spending money like water and only really have one shaky product that they can load the price on because it still has a sort of monopoly.
...the US preinstall of Pro is $399 you say - not too bad.
Our boxed version (assuming we can't have the preinstall for some strange anti-competitive reason) is £430.
Current exchange rate is 1 USD = 0.6363 GBP so...
that's the eqivalent of $683..
which means our economic recovery must be in full swing because how else could we afford this price?
Well John 29,
comparing apples to apples is what we scientists do...
The comparison then runs between $499 and $683. Which is far less bad than your peaches and apples comparison there.
Just my $0.02,
Guus
Mine's the one with Office 2010 for Partners in the pocket :-)
Bloody hell!! Over £400 for some office software, and M$ wonder why businesses haven't upgraded since office 2003 (some places still even use earlier versons) and private individuals (such as me) just download a torrent! 2003 does everything I need it to do, not to mention that I hate the ribbon interface in 2007.
I bought StarOffice (the commerical version of OpenOffice) 9 this time last year for about £60.
I purchased a Mac in September and bought iWork for about £60.
Even the student version of 2007 was only £80 - now it's gone up by another £30.
I've never ever bought MS Office and with prices nearly 7 times more expensive than its competition, I never will.
Stunned. But in all seriousness, I wonder how many companies will stump up the license fee because they either believe there's nothing else better, or they don't believe something does the job unless you pay for it.
... pay for an office package these days? Private or commercial use there's no need.
OpenOffice.org, OxygenOffice (OpenOffice with added extras), Lotus Symphony (OpenOffice with IBM's added features), Novell's edition of OpenOffice. Take your pick, they are all free!
Note to Microsoft:
Free, definition of:
Adjective describing something given or supplied without payment, adjective describing freedom from restrictive licenses, DRM, proprietory formats.
Note to El Reg:
Can't we have an icon showing that very British two-digit salute?? Please??
If you've any connection with the NHS it's about a tenner for a legit download. Schools and other government places get huge "discounts". There's the Home & Student version at somewhere between £50 and £100 depending who you buy it from, all legit. Or the student download at £30something.
And between £100 and £200 for an OEM on a new computer.
So who are the eejits buy at £400++ ?
A pricing policy similar to Ryanair's then : as much as can be screwed from the customer.
You want a computer to do some work on and are Joe Average, hence MS is the way for you.
Office Suite - £400
Laptop to run it on £400
Laptop price includes, what, £40-£50 for Windows OEM?
So all those multi-billion dollar fabs making TFTs, chips & HDDs, all the sweatshops to put the bits together, the distribution chain to move the parts all over Asia and then on to your front door, and the service and support infrastructure for the actual computer, plus the R&D to improve things - all of that has to exist on £350 or less, while MS scoop up ~£450 for pushing out some recycled code with a few extra layers of lipstick on. Impressive.
(I'm using office 2007 as an example as I expect 2010 will be similar in terms of home and student and corporate programs)
I think office is a decent tool and does what I need - however, I would not spend 449 on it - even the upgrade price of seems excessive.
BUT
most home users should be happy for the home and student edition - at 99.99 this appears to be an okay price for software that I need, know how to use, can expect other users to be able to open/read etc (this is an example for Office 2007 - but I'm sure 2010 will be similar)
Most home users will not want outlook/publisher/access
The professional/small business editions are aimed at business - so for a start they reclaim the vat from (bringing the cost to GBP382 / 254 for upgrade). And if it is a profitable company the rest will be tax dedutible - so won't cbe as big a cost to a business as you think).
There are ways to get it cheaper - Microsoft run a home use program with my company - so I get the latest version for GBP15 (ish)
Students with a .ac.uk address in the pas have been able to get it much cheaper - so no we're not all being ripped off.
So you can get it for a reasonable price and not have to resort to piracy!!!!!
I don't think MOST home users to need outlook / publisher / access - but if you do then does open office have replacement tools for something like access??????
YES IT IS EXPENSIVE BUT THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE OF MISSING THE WHOLE PICTURE AND THEN PEOPLE REPLYING WITHOUT CHECKING THE FULL STORY
It isn't that it is priced too high, it is just YET ANOTHER case where we in Blighty get completely SHAFTED by a software company. How can they justify that exchange rate? If it was that they spent a lot of money making it 'British' I'd be a bit more sympathetic, but the ONLY thing they do is sort out the spelling dictionary (Which they still get wrong anyhoo) - they rest of the software is as US oriented as any other.
Gits.
you simpletons may think that oo is good enough to replace MS Office but it's not for real users. It may be good enough for you low-end users who need to put =2+2 in a cell but for the rest of us who have to do serious work, oo doesn't even come close.
Mercifully on the partner programme I'm going to get Office 2010 in my bundles as, as much as I need MS Office, I'd never part with that sort of cash for it.
Bol??cks !
I've used huge, complex Excel spreadsheets in a scientific environment - many so large, that Excel couldn't cope and I had to shift to JMP. Of course OO isn't as fast or quite as capable BUT for most users it's good enough given that it's FREE and runs on Linux as well. If you really need it ( or think you do) spend the money - but don't patronize - OO will run really complex sheets within its limits which are considerable. You will not build a cogent argument by exaggerating !
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/gates_horns_32.png
M$ will do there god-dammest to make another proprietary file format, thereby forcing you to buy a $40 program for $800. Or, you just use Open Document format for free. Geezus, how stupid is that marketing over there at M$?
Has everyone on this site been living in a cave the last few years and really had no clue on how much the full Office suite really costs?
And as to those who are saying "who the hell will buy Office?" I think you'll find the answer is "majority of large corporates and most of the public sector"
You don't think Microsoft makes a large percentage of it's overall revenue by giving away Office for next to now't now surely?
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