In typical Microsoft fashion, they announced their prices for Office 2010 in the UK this morning. The prices were announced, and then just for good measure, Microsoft decided to bump them up an extra £30. Their reasoning?, a technical error…..
So the prices for Microsoft Office 2010 are 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 PC’s may come with Office Starter, but this is at the manufacturers discretion. Now let’s take a look at the US prices for Office 2010. Office Home and Business costs £60 pounds less in the states and Office Professional is a bargain at £112 less than it is in the UK. I really don’t see how big software companies, and not only Microsoft can charge so much more for the exact same software if you happen to live in a different part of the world.
Microsoft also announced that they are now partnering with Facebook and MySpace which will allow users to see updates, photos and activities from those social-networking services within Outlook, as part of the OSC (Outlook Social Connector) which is in Office 2010. These two new social networking services will now go onto the list which already includes Windows Live and Linked In.
However there doesn’t seem to be any sign of Google Buzz here, and it doesn’t look like Microsoft are planning on adding it any time soon
What we think users will appreciate is that the Outlook Social Connectordoesn’t add another professional or social network into the mix. The Outlook Social Connector does offer busy people, who are already a part of one or several networks, convenience – not confusion.
Microsoft announced support for Linked In today in a blog post and said that Facebook and MySpace will be available for download before the official release of Office 2010.
Source:
This is a result of applying PPP theory as I see. They will take different Variables into account to expect the price in the UK to be equal to the US. For example, taking interest rate and inflation rate in both countries wouldn’t indicate the same pricing strategy for Microsoft.