Microsoft this morning announced the UK pricing for it’s Office 2010 suite, and then swiftly upped the prices by £30 claiming a cock-up had been made.
The prices currently stand as follows…
Home and Student – £110 (£90 for just a product key card), this contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and the Web Apps integration
Home and Business – £240 (£190 for just a product key card), this contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and the Web Apps integration
Professional – £430 (£300 for just a product key card), this contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access, Premium Technical Support and the Web Apps integration
New PCs may come with the free Office Starter at the discretion of the PC builder which may be perfectly good enough for most people’s everyday needs.
Just to put these into perspective the current US pricing means that Home and Business costs £60 less in the US and Professional comes in a staggering £112 cheaper stateside. This, of course is nothing new to UK consumers who have become used to being ripped-off by US software companies, Adobe being a good example, where it’s commonly cheaper to fly to New York and book a hotel overnight while you buy the copies of their full-suites at prices significantly cheaper than their UK editions.
That said, the product key only versions, which will enable you to upgrade the Starter Editions already installed on new PCs offer much better value for money, and it’s now inevitable that many people will get Office Starter Edition from torrent sites or Computer Fairs and buy a product key to save money.
The one thing that appears to be missing here, and this now seems increasingly odd in the day of the App Store, is the lack of download pricing direct from Microsoft. This would mitigate some of the issues with torrents, though it seems unlikely at this stage that a special downloadable edition of Microsoft Office 2010 will be available.
The stripped-down Web version of Office 2010 will be available to all free of charge.
Source: PC Pro
