So, Microsoft Office 2004 Professional includes the same stuff as Standard, plus Virtual PC with Windows XP, right? Says so right there on MS's page.
Well, imagine if you are a corporate buyer and you own a bunch of licenses to MS Office. Imagine you pay their protection money every other year to get you all the upgrades.
If you asked and asked, you would have eventually found someone at MS who would tell you that volume licenses are eligible for the Pro edition. So then you'd wait patiently for months after the release of Office 04 Pro until they release the Licensing CD. This is a copy of the CD that works with an existing volume license. You can find it on various resellers... it's MS product number Y15-00096.
Well, what they apparently forgot to tell anyone is that this version appears to not include Windows XP. Or any operating system for that matter. The entire VPC CD only contains around 40 MB of data.
Just to make it more insulting... as you install VPC7, it asks you if you want to install the copy of XP that you got with Office Pro. It then stalls, asking you to insert the CD that is currently inserted (it does not recognize the CD because it doesn't have XP on it).
Thanks, Microsoft. I might have found some minor value in having WinXP on a few of my Macs, but there's no way I'm going to buy a bunch of copies like they seem to think. The more I think about, the more I realize how obsolete Windows is. My Unix-based Panther can do anything. The only two exceptions are running some IE6-only websites and running some EXEs. I can have a crappy old PC sitting around for that.
Anyway, just wanted to point out this completely undocumented, unmentioned feature of MS volume licensing. I hope Apple does release a whole Office suite at MWSF. I can't wait to be free of these corporate bad boys.
Well, imagine if you are a corporate buyer and you own a bunch of licenses to MS Office. Imagine you pay their protection money every other year to get you all the upgrades.
If you asked and asked, you would have eventually found someone at MS who would tell you that volume licenses are eligible for the Pro edition. So then you'd wait patiently for months after the release of Office 04 Pro until they release the Licensing CD. This is a copy of the CD that works with an existing volume license. You can find it on various resellers... it's MS product number Y15-00096.
Well, what they apparently forgot to tell anyone is that this version appears to not include Windows XP. Or any operating system for that matter. The entire VPC CD only contains around 40 MB of data.
Just to make it more insulting... as you install VPC7, it asks you if you want to install the copy of XP that you got with Office Pro. It then stalls, asking you to insert the CD that is currently inserted (it does not recognize the CD because it doesn't have XP on it).
Thanks, Microsoft. I might have found some minor value in having WinXP on a few of my Macs, but there's no way I'm going to buy a bunch of copies like they seem to think. The more I think about, the more I realize how obsolete Windows is. My Unix-based Panther can do anything. The only two exceptions are running some IE6-only websites and running some EXEs. I can have a crappy old PC sitting around for that.
Anyway, just wanted to point out this completely undocumented, unmentioned feature of MS volume licensing. I hope Apple does release a whole Office suite at MWSF. I can't wait to be free of these corporate bad boys.