Microsoft offers many versions of Office 2010. Here's a chart

Why force users to endure an ad-supported limited version now?

Microsoft has revealed a whole plethera of options and prices for Office 2010. On Tuesday it announced the prices for four boxed retail versions and three "key card" versions. It has also promised a free, advertising supported version (available only on new PCs).

I've pieced together a chart from a variety of sources including Microsoft's official pricing announcement via its Microsoft Office team blog, and news stories hosted in Network World.

Remember, the Product Key Card is nothing more than the price you pay to upgrade the freebie, limited starter version that is bundled on a new PC to a fuller, paid-for version. You buy it at major retail outlets. The boxed versions reportedly support two installations, so if you have to wipe your hard drive and start over, that's handy to know. The PKC will only activiate the bundled version. If you want to install Office 2010 on an older PC, you can't buy the PKC.

Given that Microsoft has been offering Works without ads for a couple of decades now, I'm not sure it isn't thumbing its nose at those who buy a new Windows PC. Why must they deal with an ad-supported Microsoft Office Starter at this point? Won't that simply drive them into the free and open arms of Office.org?

Best deal in the bunch is obviously the academic version. Microsoft is charging three-to-four times more for the exact same bundle if you don't qualify for the academic version. Doesn't seem like a reasonable price gap to me but if people are willing to pay that much more for Publisher and Access, who am I to judge?

These are retail prices of course.

If you roll out Office 2010 at your enterprise, you'll be using an enterprise volume license and the process is the same as the one implemented for Vista (and also in place for Windows Server 2008 & R2 and Windows 7), Microsoft says. These are the Multiple Activation Key (MAK) and the Key Management Service (KMS).

I once took a TechEd course on these two technologies, and all I can say is, if you haven't dealt with MAK or KMS, before you buy, get some training. In a nutshell, MAK authenticates Office from a Microsoft hosted server and is necessary for organizations that have lots of laptops roaming around not connected to the network. KMS is a local service that manages keys via your network.

I've been playing with the Office 2010 beta and I like it. I haven't found it to be superiour to Office 2007 in any significant way, however, but I do prefer Microsoft Office, with all its bells and whistles, to any of the word processing/spreadsheet freeware I've used (including Google Apps).

Like this post? Check out these others.

• 7 big IT orgs that showed Microsoft the door
• Most business will adopt Windows 7 by 2011, but prefer Google's cloud
• Watch out Microsoft: GNOME is poised to have a killer 2010
• Microsoft Exchange/Outlook 2010 UC Mobile and Voicemail Features (Beta) Release!
• Windows 7 Remote Admin Tools: Controls Windows Server 2008 from your Windows 7 desktop
• Secrets of Exchange Server 2010
• Unified Messaging (Voicemail) in Exchange 2010
• Microsoft's data cache technology, code-named Velocity, speeds app performance

Plus, visit the Microsoft Subnet web site for more news, blogs, podcasts. Subscribe to all Microsoft Subnet bloggers. Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.)
Follow All Microsoft Subnet bloggers on Twitter
Follow Julie Bort on Twitter

• Microsoft
• Microsoft Office 2010
• Office 2010