The tech community has talked about companies like Microsoft delivering software through an online platform for quite some time. Well, it looks like it’s finally going to happen, with Microsoft announcing it will charge a fee to anyone who wishes to download Office 2007 Beta 2.

No doubt, web-based software is the future of all desktop computing, but Microsoft is taking it to a whole new level by charging for a beta. That takes big balls, extreme arrogance and definitely a little bit of stupidity.

According to Microsoft, the company says Office 2007 Beta 2 has been so popular that the Redmond-based giant will be forced to charge people to offset the cost of its servers.

“Having exceeded our beta 2 participation goals by 500 per cent, we have had to make the business decision to implement a cost recovery measure for future downloads of beta 2…” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register.

Beginning August 2, the company says users will be charged a fee of $1.50 (all figures in US funds) per download.

According to IT Wire, Microsoft sold almost $12 billion of Office products, raking in more than $8 billion in profit last year.

But who the hell charges for a beta? Microsoft seems to need some education as to what a beta is designed to do, as it seems the company has had difficulty grasping the concept:

It took a long time for Microsoft to realize that releasing software under a “beta” banner will excuse it for having holes and bugs. It’s a page out of the Google playbook that the Big-G plays well (In fact, Gmail is still in Beta format).

But now, Microsoft is taking beta to a whole new level by trying to charge users for it. Clearly, the company has realized it’s far cheaper to give a public beta rather than paying its own employees to test the software. But somehow the company has turned the market model on its head by charging $1.50 with each download, meaning Microsoft is now charging for something it should be paying for (Who wants to pay for a product that is not perfect to begin with?).

Someone in the company’s marketing department probably got a big raise for coming up with the excuse to tell the world they are charging to offset download costs. With their cards out on the table, I would call that bluff in a second. Most likely, Microsoft saw three million people from whom they had to find a way to profit.

Leave it to Microsoft to try this while other companies like Google offer 2.7 GB of space free of charge to its Gmail subscribers. Can you imagine the cost to Google’s servers?

Or how about video streaming on sites like YouTube.com or Google Video? Those sites endure terabytes of bandwidth pressure yet both operate free of charge to users.

There are thousands of websites and companies that sell software and services free of charge to users. Microsoft needs to open its eyes to the new realities of the Internet, where the push is toward free content, services and software. Users aren’t the ones paying for products anymore — advertisers do.

The Internet is now full of choices, and with open source alternatives like Open Office being able to offer users virtually the same product as Microsoft Office (but it’s free), the world is going to react fiercely.

Microsoft sits and wonders why it has been left in the dust while other companies like Google, Yahoo, and a billion user-driven sites flourish. They wonder why the world is getting increasingly less tolerant of the company.

It’s an idea like this that makes users hate the company that once ruled the computer industry.

source: www.digitaljournal.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Linux/Open Source [t], Microsoft Network [t]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.