Really, honestly, you
want people to pay you $1.50 for the download of your poorly dubbed Office 2007 system (small "s")? What good will that do? How does that encourage the download and successful beta testing of one of your biggest cash cows, hmmm Microsoft? This will promote piracy of the beta (sad, isn't it). This will also make current "free beta" testers mad at you (like me). I think the new Office (2007 system) is pretty good. Perhaps the best to date, this Office really does have it's charms. The whole $1.50 charge thing not included of course. Here's the 64 million dollar question, why not use BitTorrent or something? C'mon, everybody (else) is doing it. Be like the cool kids, Microsoft, please? I suppose what Microsoft decides to do is their prerogative, but having an opinion is mine. Sorry everyone, Microsoft has downgraded this download from FREE to paid. $1.50 isn't much, but we're talking about a 1/3 of a latte here. That, in my book is serious business.
Tags: beta, commercial, download, freeware, latte, microsoft, news, Office2007
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Comments
12
Subscribe to commentsChrisJul 31st 2006 6:13PM
I pay $4.52 for a Venti Soy Vanilla Latte at Starbucks...WITH foam...
M$ can suck it.
Ryan CarterJul 31st 2006 6:21PM
Yeah, okay fine, like 7/8ths of a third then. My favorite legal addictive stimulant is a grande (or Venti, depends on the day) vanilla added coffee frappacino. Ahhh. Wonder how many Word dox I could squeeze out of that. Perhaps a few Access tables?
EvanJul 31st 2006 6:26PM
"this Office really does have it's charms"
Should just be "its charms". We all have our off days :)
Funny I see this post when I was just looking for the beta, Microsoft's site is so hard to figure out. Blah.
Ryan CarterJul 31st 2006 6:31PM
Yeah, you're right. I hate the whole "its" versus "it's" thing. I usually remember. Thanks for pointing that out.
PeterJul 31st 2006 7:01PM
MS will never go for BitTorrent. They don't even want you to redistribute Service Packs and other patches.
Their concern (and I can understand it) is that they want you to come and get the software directly from them. That way they know what you are getting. If you download some piece of MS software from BitTorrent and it doesn't work, then you are going to blame MS. And if you contact them, they are going to say "Did you get the files from us?"
MS does plenty of stupid and annoying things (like making people pay for betas?!), but remember it isn't easy supporting as many users as they have.
Tony F.Aug 1st 2006 2:56AM
are you serious, if microsoft was to offer office 2007 via bit torrent, they would overload the internet, anmd break it, read up on it, they did studies
MattAug 1st 2006 7:33AM
Red Swoosh are offering Microsoft Office 2007 via the
Akamised link .Red Swoosh is a p2p content distribution service that has managed centralised controll so it will not overwhelm the interweb like Bittorent would do.
http://www.redswoosh.net/blog/?p=46
Ryan CarterAug 1st 2006 8:49AM
Microsoft could not "break the internet" especially using BitTorrent. That is the whole point of using it. The Internet is designed so that no one can break it from any one point. This is historically true, if you research the early days of ARPAnet. It was a military strategy that would allow the rest of the network to remain operational if one node got taken out.
Sure, there may be some Microsoft server shutdowns because of the load, as we witnessed during the first few days of the Vista public beta, but this why you use BitTorrent. It distributes that file sharing load between many nodes so no one takes a large hit. And it obviously didn't shut down the Internet.
asurrocaAug 1st 2006 10:06AM
To the people discussing the grammatical error, give Ryan a break, he obviously had to forgo his latte today to buy the Office 2007 download :)
My question is, what about the lot of us who already have the beta? Are we going to get charged for any updates? Ugh.
FabuloAug 1st 2006 6:31PM
I think Tony F.'s comment was sarcastic...
MS has never been the hip new dude. They won't do bittorrent because that is associated w/pirated content and unsavory operation (in *their* mind, it is)
There are simple ways to make sure you get the right file out of BT. Publish the hash on the MS web site (where you should need an key for activation anyway) and off you go.
I think MS realized there was not enough bugs in that beta, and short of a few cosmetic change this is quite close to final release. So instead of giving it for free, they'll charge a huge upfront cost for downloading.
$1.5 for a whole office suite, that's a pretty sweet deal compared to $1 for a 4 minutes song by Britney Spears that you can only play on YOUR iPod.
(note to self: check out Oo2.0, I hear even the download is free)
MohitAug 4th 2006 4:24AM
For #9: updates will remain to be free.
blaAug 15th 2006 5:47PM
I pay 1,30 € for a Latte. So it's even 1:1. Not that I'm interested in the Beta anyway. I wait for the final.