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Shipoftheline
31-07-2006, 12:10 PM
THE BEAST of Redmond is planning to charge a $1.50 fee for downloading Office 2007 Beta 2. Surfers have until at 6 pm (PDT) on Wednesday 2nd August to still get it for free.
Microsoft's explanation for this is: "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers." It reckons that since the beta was released back in May [2006], it's been downloaded three million times.

So if it gets downloaded another three million times, Microsoft would earn another $4.5 million. That's an awful lot of money just for a bit of extra capacity on their servers.

Updates will still be made available for free, however.

According to the report on ZDnet , "This is the first time Microsoft has charged for an Office beta, and it's not something that is planned for on a repeat basis," a spokesperson said. In the past, the Beast has charged for sending beta disks out to people, however.

It's also much cheaper than the Mac community has come to expect. The public version of OS X cost $20 on disk with no download possible


Microsoft to charge for beta (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 1 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. You can't really blame them if people are prepared to buy it. I found the beta very slow and hung alot myself so will leave it

berley
31-07-2006, 01:35 PM
at least they made it available free for a while and peeps that still want it still have time, cant really be much fairer than that can they

duke0102
02-08-2006, 06:54 PM
for an individual dload its not alot so cant complain

universall
10-08-2006, 08:12 PM
yeah it was free, but most of the time they dont place a big ad saying its free for a limited time. oh well!!

Declan
11-08-2006, 02:35 PM
i have the the office 2007 beta installer on my desktop and the frontpage one, if anyones want it , just tell me where i can upload it and i will do so, and everyone gets the same serial key so it is not illegal

johnzer
11-08-2006, 07:55 PM
i tried installin it but it just wasnt happening :s

tbh microsoft has a good idea it's like £1 to download? well think of the millions downloading that for £1...

that's alot more than their bandwidth costs they're making

Declan
12-08-2006, 03:03 PM
so what it is microsoft, they make billions and they want to charge people a pound, in my opinon this is a bad idea because people will just turn to p2p and download it there

graham
13-08-2006, 08:45 PM
i had this but there is a timer on it and it expired ..... so off it went to the lectro dustbin

vandrews
14-08-2006, 11:01 AM
I do not mind paying a fee to download a beater, but when the installer
craps out and it makes the machine unstable, it does seem a little unfair.

Maybe Mr gates is going to give the fee's to one of his charitie's. I could
not fault him for that.

Vinnie