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Microsoft announced the Office 2010 prices for the European market. With the exception of the Home and Student edition, the European prices are unbelievably high. Most US companies just convert one US dollar into one euro, which is already unfair considering that one US dollar equals 0.73 euro. Although one has to consider that the language pack has its price, that doesn’t explain that Office 2010 Professional costs almost twice as much in Europe as in the US.
The good thing is that you can get Office cheaper if you only buy the product key without the DVD. I have been criticizing Microsoft’s practice of selling software in colorful boxes as if the internet didn’t exist. It appears Microsoft has finally arrived in the internet age. Let’s just see when the boxes become history. What I find remarkable is how big the price difference is.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can repeat the success of Windows 7 with Office 2010. After the Vista marketing debacle many bloggers believed that this is the beginning of the end of Windows. It appears this prophecy won’t come true any time soon considering that Microsoft has already sold 90 million copies. But I suspect even more people are out there who think that MS Office is obsolete because the future belongs to cloud-based Office applications such as Google Docs. I seriously doubt it simply because a web browser will never offer the same capabilities as a full-blown operating system. If this ever happens, a browser will become as complex as Windows. The other question is whether Microsoft-critical Europe won’t move increasingly to Open Office considering those high prices.
You probably have heard that if you buy Office 2007 now you can upgrade to Office 2010 for free. However, just in case you have no use for a colorful Office 2010 box, you can save money if you just wait. Office 2010 will RTM in April, businesses will get it on May 12, and consumers will have to wait until June.
Below are the Office 2010 prices for Europe (in euros) and for the US (in US dollars). The first price is for Office and the second price is for Office plus colorful box. It appears there are no product key card versions for the academic version and the single editions. I wasn’t able to find the US prices for the individual products. Please let me know if you know more.
- Office Home and Student 2010 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote): 109 euros, 139 euros | 119 dollars, 149 dollars
- Office Home and Business 2010 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook): 249 euros, 379 euros | 199 dollars, 279 dollars
- Office Professional 2010 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access): 499 euros, 699 euros | 349 dollars, 499 dollars
- Office Professional Academic 2010: 109 euros | 99 dollars
- Word 2010: 189 euros
- Excel 2010: 189 euros
- PowerPoint 2010: 189 euros
- OneNote 2010: 109 euros
- Outlook 2010: 189 euros
- Publisher 2010: 189 euros
- Access 2010: 189 euros
- Academic version for each of the above individual products: 59 euros
Why EU prices are higher?
I would say it’s the cost of doing business with the EU buraucrats
. And don’t you guys also have VAT?
I would suspect that the cost of doing business in Europe vs. the USA is monumentally higher for Microsoft. They have to recoup some of those monumental fines imposed by the EU somehow. I’m sure the EU returned all those “damages” fines to the end-users, right?
Actually, I had such a sentence in the article before. Perhaps it is now Microsoft that is issuing a fine. Of course, this would be just mere speculation. If the EC sees it this way, then the war will certainly continue.
Taxes don’t explain it. I am ordering sometimes products in the US. Even if you include shipping and customs I’ve never paid more than a “one-to-one exchange rate”. For example, I ordered a Kindle in the US and all in all I paid about €250. The US price is $259.
Another explanation is that Microsoft thinks that Obama is wrong and not the US but the EU is the richest “country” in the world. So we can easily afford it.
given that Microsoft Office still doesn’t save out standard compliant xml, and it doesn’t have a handy save to epub function either, maybe the europeans will just go open source and save themselves the price, the shipping and the customes.
Maybe because the continent europe is on is the same russia and part of asia is on, Micro$oft figures european prices should reflect that you can buy Office 2010 in any russian or asian mall for $1.50…
MS has given up on backward compatibility anyway, first with their myriad development frameworks, now with office.
I’ve used office since word and excel started, and up to office 2003, my skills and memorized keyboard shortcuts kept me flying through whatever I needed to do.
Office 2007 comes along and nothing works, unless I resort to excessive, slow mouse use.
Since the open source stuff duplicates MS’ old office keyboard shortcuts, its now easier for me to switch to free software than to keep using MS Office.
Go figure… I don’t mind, I’ll be hanging out on Cancun for two weeks for the money I saved
Anybody wanna join me?
haha, true, in Asian malls, the price of software is determined by how many blank CD’s or DVD’s had to be used up for it.
If its less than 800MB, 50 cents will buy it.
if its less than 4.7GB, you be out a dollar…
If you fell for it and bought too much to fit in your Jacket, you can just get an ugly $10.000 Luis Vuitton bag for another dollar in the shop next door
Humans are much like monkeys, only they use spreadsheets to count the bananas they fight over, and who has to pick flees off who.