Microsoft decided not to offer any upgrade pricing for Office 2010. This to me reeks of arrogance. We often had clients that would like to purchase their Office licensing via OEM channels – as this gives them the ability to purchase office at the lowest possible price. Then later once a new version comes out, if the client deems the business value high enough they have been able to purchase an upgrade for the specific machines that they wish to upgrade to the latest version. However in their latest decision, Microsoft have basically said no more. No more upgrade. The only way people can get a cheap version of Office 2010 is if you’ve been subscribing to Software Assurance. That means you will have needed to buy into the Microsoft vision for future product development well before you see the product. It’s like insurance except you don’t know what you will get or how well it will work for your business until it’s there. Oh and if the product you get is not what you need or they change the product in some way that is not good for your business then too bad… you already paid your money.
Microsoft. Listen up. When you do things like this you really show that you are not listening to the needs of our clients. You give cause to things like GoogleApps thinking they will own the world. Unfortunately they are even worse than you. I would not trust or recommend GoogleApps to any of my clients, and that means right now the only REAL alternative is to pay full price for Office 2010. I don’t like it, but believe me – when there is another decent alternative… I’ll be moving to it. Keep on doing what you are doing and you will find that we’ve all jumped ship to other products. You’ve been told about this for many a year now, but it fails to sink in.
On that same theme, the Volume Licensing version of Office 2010 Standard is US$110 higher than the retail boxed version. Really??? I am not even comparing it against the OEM version costs!
So, if you are using Terminal Services (aka RDS), and you want to use Office, your only option is to purchase OVL Office 2010 for US$373. That’s right, Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint. Got the possiblilty of 10 users? That will be $3,730. OR… if you want SA, pay even more and hope that MS releases the next version within your 3 year SA agreement, or you will have just blown even more money.
Microsoft is in many respects a bloated bureaucracy, like many government agencies around the world. It has become a self-licking ice cream cone. At some point the golden goose that is Windows and Office will die and it will all come crumbling down around Microsoft’s head. At the speed of change in the internet age, this time may be coming sooner rather than later. VERY, VERY few people need even 2% of the capabilities of Office yet they are compelled to purchase all of it to get the basics.
I remember when Word Perfect was $495 (when $495 was worth $1000). Lotus 1-2-3 was priced similarly. Word Perfect Network version was about $100 per copy. Everyone bought it since they were hooked up to Novell (another success story.) Then they got greedy and changed their pricing and jacked the networking version up close to individual pricing. That was the beginning of the end for Word Perfect. We know the rest of their story.
It looks like deja vu all over again…