Microsoft to charge for Office2007 beta
30 07 2006To the suprise of many, starting on 2nd August 2006 at 6pm (PDT), Microsoft will be charging users $1.50 (£0.80) per download of Office2007.
This move apparently came round after the Office beta was alot more popular than expected, and with 3million downloads, that was five hundred percent more than Microsoft thought it would be.
Existing users of the beta will be able to download updates for free, but many have been outraged that a multi-billion company like Microsoft has to charge for beta software (that will stop working sometime, just like most betas!) with the fee helping “offset the cost of downloading from the servers”.
You still have a few days to download it free, so go and get it quick!
Or they could’ve used a torrent distribution network and saved the bandwidth–I actually downloaded the files off of a torrent because the download kept failing
Yeah, it’s a shame everyone associates torrents with illegal software/warez