Microsoft Bleeds Their Customers Again—Office 2008

Office 2008 for OS X is out, and Microsoft has found a new way to stick it to their customers. Sucking every possible penny out the emptor seems to be the new MS business model. They used the same type of strategy with the less than stellar Vista release. Microsoft is no longer happy selling a Home and Server version of their OS. No, they now want to charge a different amount for each purpose. Four versions of Windows; come on, that is just ridiculous. Well now they are trying the same approach with Office 2008. Some rocket scientist figured it would be a good idea to cripple Entourage in the home addition. This way they could sell three different version of the same software ranging in price from $149 – $499. If you spend $499 you get Office plus a working Entourage, media software that most MAC users have no use for, and Automator Actions. If there weren’t so much money on the line, it might actually be funny.

Previous versions of Office came with a fully functioning Entourage at all levels. After all, it is the only way users can effectively connect to Exchange services. If Microsoft wants Exchange to be the premier mail and scheduling platform, why make it more difficult for students, teachers, and home users to access the services? Aside from the questionable logic, users of Office X were led to believe that if they purchased Office 2004 (including the Student version) they would receive the updated Office 2008 for the cost of shipping. Well, they received 2008, but its components are not equivalent with Entourage being crippled. In my opinion, this was an extremely deceptive play.

So, is Office 2008 Student/Home addition worth $149; yes—it is a worthwhile upgrade. The UI has gone under a major renovation and many new formatting features have been added. Is 2008 worth $399; I guess that depends on how bad you need Exchange server connectivity. For me, I will run my XP version of Outlook inside of Fusion and stick with the $149 Office 2008.

M Nassal

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 1:19 am and is filed under M Nassal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.