Microsoft guns for 2-for-1 sales with 'pre-installed' Office 2010 deal
Buy a (Windows-based) PC, get cheaper apps suite
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Microsoft has finally dished up UK prices for its forthcoming Office 2010 suite.
The software vendor revealed US prices in January, and at the same time confirmed that customers who bought Office 2010 pre-installed by OEMs rather than purchasing an off-the-shelf copy stood to save a few bucks to boot.
Microsoft will be offering a similar incentive here in Blighty when Office 2010 lands in June.
The company said today that the Office Home and Student so-called Product Key Card carries a £89.99 price tag, compared with £109.99 for the packaged product.
Office Home and Business can be activated via a key card for £189.99 a pop, versus a boxed price of £239.99. The Office Professional pre-installed copy will cost £299.99, compared to £399.99 at retail.
Redmond is of course clearly hoping to scoop up more sales of Windows 7 by offering prices for Office 2010 Product Key Cards that undercut the boxed-up, shrink-wrapped version of the software sold by the likes of PC World and others.
The catch being that UK customers can only "take advantage" of the "greater value" prices by first buying a PC from one of Microsoft's retail partners, which it's fair to assume will have Windows happily loaded on to it.
Meanwhile, Redmond has told biz customers to play the waiting game on Office 2010 prices.
"Details on Volume Licensing for Office 2010 are not available at this time," it said. ®
COMMENTS
but but but
Office 2010 does SO much more than Office 2003, like.... ummm.
But you can't deny it comes with some really shite^W great programs. Like full-fat Outlook. Yeah, now the home user can enjoy the feeling of dull corporate servitude right in their own home. Don't forget to schedule in some time for "boredom" in your Outlook calendar!
How about that MS Publisher? Take a trip back to 1998 with thousands of butt-ugly leaflet and flyer templates right at your finger tips. Birthday party coming up? Don't forget to show your loved one you care with a piece of A4 copier paper folded in half twice. Publisher will even show you how to make it.
And don't forget to set up a home inventory system using MS Access, so that you're never more than 48 clicks away from the data you need, such as "how many toilet rolls do I have left?".
And what home user wouldn't be impressed by InfoPath and OneNote? Apparently corporate users love them for doing... whatever it is they do... and that's good enough reason to waste another 600MB of anyone's disk space, right?
Wouldn't a supplier do MUCH better ,..
... to preinstall Open Office ?
Apart from the fact that it needn't cost either them or the customer anything, they would be helping to encourage the use of genuine open standards.
Not in Europe
Not in Europe, it doesn't work like that.
We have this little thing called Exhaustion of Rights to prevent exactly this sort of abuse. Whether you received an OEM copy or a retail copy, the licence is equally transferrable.
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