From now you have to pay to get the Office 2007 beta.
I hope all of you who wanted to get the Office 2007 beta saw our ” Get your Office 2007 beta now” issue last weekend and managed to get it before the charging system has begun.
We were wondering about the details of the announced US$1.50 charge – now it’s been implemented we know that the $1.50 charge is per product download. Office 2007 Professional Plus counts as a single download. The 2007 editions of OneNote, Visio, Project and Sharepoint Designer (formerly FrontPage) now cost US$1.50 each to download the beta versions.
This ‘cost recovery’ decision is mostly to stop people downloading the large files for trivial reasons not really connected with testing or evaluating the new product. As the news of Office 2007 spreads some people may have decided to download the beta and use it, saving their money until the full product is released early next year. It’s possible that a charge, however small, will make some of those people think twice.
