Office 2010 pricing announced

Microsoft says that 2,000,000 people have downloaded the beta version of Office 2010. I hope they all understand that they’ll have to uninstall it before installing the real version. Anyway…

MS just announced pricing for Office 2010. The best part of the announcement: you can buy a “card” that has an activation key – no need to buy the whole stupid box, if you can beg or borrow a copy of the bits. I hope that’s the way MS will head for all of its products. (The next logical step is to encourage distribution via torrents or the newsgroups, which are infinitely more efficient and “green” than shrinkwrapped boxes.)

The fine print: if you buy a box, you can install copies of the software on two different PCs. If you get the card, you’re limited to one.

The prices:

Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote): $149 boxed, $119 product key for one PC only. There’s a three-license Family Pack coming. After re-re-re-reading Microsoft’s announcement, it isn’t clear to me if the $149 boxed price is for the Family Pack, or if there’s a separate Family Pack product, with its own price.

Home & Business (adds Outlook): $279 boxed, $199 product key.

Pro (adds Publisher and Access): $499 boxed, $349 product key.

The Pro Academic version (which is only available through Academic outlets) is $99 for the boxed version, and there doesn’t appear to be a key-only option.

Note that there’s no “upgrade” pricing, no confusing licensing terms, no talk about “qualifying” systems, or meaningless requirements such as a “student” reside at your home. Just four options – three, if you think of Academic as an island unto its own. Bravo. Something else Microsoft has (finally!) done right.

There’s some bogus wording that the two-license allowance is only for “your PCs” – and I bet we see something about the Family Pack only being installed on three “Family” PCs. We’ll have to see if Microsoft attaches some bogus restrictions to the definition of “your” and/or “Family.” But in general, they’re headed in the right direction.

Okay, so call me old-fashioned, but I still don’t see anything that really grabs me in Office 2010. Maybe working with it for a while will change my tune.

Meanwhile, there’s a fire sale going on for Office 2007.

UPDATE: Ed Bott has a good analysis of the pricing and the major changes it represents.