No Upgrade Path To New Microsoft Office 2010
Microsoft has unveiled its latest version of Microsoft Office. But Office 2010 offers no upgrade path for previous users of the software suite.
In the past, users of Office were able to purchase upgrades instead of paying full price for new versions. In my opinion, discontinuing this option is a mistake, given the economy and the fact that many Office users see no reason to upgrade.
Microsoft faces competition from the free OpenOffice as well as from cloud-based services like Google Docs. Perhaps Microsoft’s reasoning behind the discontinuation of upgrade pricing is to lure people to the cloud-based version of Office 2010 (which is available free for consumers on Windows Live via an ad-supported service). If so, alienating previous customers is a gamble that may not pay off.
What do you think? Do you plan to upgrade to Office 2010 and if not, would upgrade pricing have altered your decision?
My office has over 20 users currently using Office Pro 2002 and I want to migrate to Office Pro 2010. I have been told that there is no upgrade path so am now moving to Open Office. Also that there is no volume discounting for 20+ users. I do not subscribe to the fad that the place to be is ‘in the cloud’ so Microsoft have lost a customer. My next project is to move servers from the Back Office Server platform and Exchange server to a Unix platform.
Hi Ken, thanks for your remarks. I think Microsoft wants us to go cloud whether we want to or not. While it may lose them customers in the short term, I’m not sure we’re going to continue to see the traditional computing model of software installed locally on workstations. Seems like we’re trending toward a model that looks more like the mainframes and dumb terminals of old, only the mainframe is cloud services on the Internet and the dumb terminals are tablets and smartphones.