Office 2010 pricing announced

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 06 January 2010 01:58

IT Industry - Development

Microsoft has announced the U.S. retail pricing for its Office 2010 suite of productivity applications, which will be offered in four versions and two pricing levels.

Office 2010 entered public beta in November and, according to the Microsoft Office product development group blog , has been downloaded at a rate of 40,000 copies a day.

Microsoft claims that nine out of ten of those beta users like Office 2010 better than the productivity suite they're currently using.

The final product, expected to ship in the first half of the year, will come in four versions. All four will be available as full boxed products that permit their use on two or three PCs.

For three of the editions, Microsoft will also offer (at a lower price) a product key card that will unlock a single version of Office.

As previously reported , new PCs will ship with free, ad-supported, limited-functionality versions of Word and Excel called Office Starter 2010. Those PCs also have the full version of Office preinstalled, and the product key card will unlock the full version, providing an upgrade path from Office Starter.

See the chart below for the announced pricing, given in US dollars.