Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft Office 2010 No Longer Available As An Upgrade

"I'm a Microsoft Office devotee. Sure, cloud-based apps are fine. But I like dependable, fast software right on my own computer. My life revolves fairly happily around Outlook. You can pry Excel out of my cold dead fingers. But maybe it'll be Excel 2007 you'll be prying away, because Office 2010's new pricing policy has really ticked me off."

It appears Microsoft have removed the upgrade version of Office 2010 and the only choice is to buy one of the full product versions. As Danny Sullivan says in his blog, this will feel like a price increase to users especially as Office isn't exactly cheap to start with. With the availability of free competing products such as Google Docs or Openoffice, there is a good chance that many will see this as a chance to switch from Office to save money. It will be interesting to see the market share statistics in the future to see if there has been any change.