Microsoft has opened its Office 2010 bet testing to public on Nov 18, 2009, which has caused quite a bit buzz all over the internet. While it offers loads of new appealing features, I found one thing is more interesting in particular.
If you haven’t noticed, Microsoft has announced about a month before Office 2010 beta went to public that the new Office 2010 has a new edition called Starter, a reduced-functionality, advertising-supported version.
The Starter edition only includes Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010, with the basic functionality of creating, viewing and editing documents. It’s introduced to replace Microsoft Works in order to offering a consistent Office user experience with a simply upgrade path to a fully-featured version of 2010. Because of that, it’s exclusively available on new PCs. Another words, it’s for OEM only and you can not get from anywhere else.
While it’s a good idea including a free version of Office to new PC buyers, it’s awful injecting ads along with it. It’s like Adsense coming to your desktop, or pharmacy running in your word document or excel spreadsheet. A very poor marketing approach from a software giant like Microsoft.
Will you like it?
