Microsoft to Charge for Office Betas

Monday, Jul. 31 2006 | Author: Dave

Microsoft can’t handle giving out their software betas for free anymore, so they are going to start charging $1.50 US for beta version of Office 2007. Starting August 2nd, anyone wanting to download the beta software will have to pay this small fee.

The company claims this is the result of the success of the trial - 3m people have downloaded the software - so Microsoft needs to charge to cover server costs.

A statement sent to the Reg reads: “We are thrilled with the incredible excitement around the upcoming 2007 Microsoft Office system as evident by more than 3m people using the beta 2 since its release two months ago.

“Having exceeded our beta 2 participation goals by 500 per cent, we have had to make the business decision to implement a cost recovery measure for future downloads of beta 2 beginning 2 August, 2006.”

I think that this is pathetic. Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in the world, needs to charge millions of people $1.50 a piece to recoup bandwidth costs? I think that paying $1.50 is just enough for me to say skip the beta. What about you?

Category: General

3 Responses for "Microsoft to Charge for Office Betas"

Tris Hussey

July 31st, 2006 at 3:45 pm
1

I agree. This is lame and short-sighted. We, as beta testers, are doing them a favour by testing and sedning feedback and crash reports and they want to CHARGE us for the privledge. Not. Pass.
Griffith

July 31st, 2006 at 9:18 pm
2

If this was coming from any other company, I wouldn’t be surprised, however, I must admit that coming from Microsoft this is a bit pathetic.

They didn’t even put a WGA validator for people to try it out for free, actually, they didn’t put one up for Windows Vista either. So they wanted to grasp as many people as they could, they shouldn’t be complaining about the consequences now.

If this were a smaller company, I wouldn’t find it surprising, but many, if not all graphics-related websites like Adobe’s site, offer trial versions of all their programs for free.

And when I mention Adobe, I’m also referring to the hundred other sites that follow the same model.

For 1.5$ (if it were the equivalent to euros) I could download 1.5GB of data, and the office package is only 440mb.

Though, on the other hand, after working for a software company for a few years I can think of one or two reasons why Microsoft did this. If there isn’t a time limit (without a crack) on a trial program you present to a company, even if it has restrictions, the person won’t mind not paying you another penny as long as it works, they’d rather live with the restrictions than pay for a license.

And if Microsoft Office, which is Microsoft’s biggest cash cow, gets distributed to way over 3 million computers, those are 3 million people less likely to buy the final version in the future.
mp3idiot

August 1st, 2006 at 7:54 am
3

Insane! Server costs is incomparable to the amount of money needed to hire QAs to test their beta!