say no pay for beta

Microsoft has started yet another trend - a charge for testing its beta Office 2007. This sound like a direct accusation, folks, but a Microsoft spokesman says that they had to take the fee in order to manage the unexpected, huge amount of traffic in this download server. Sounds fully logical to me; however, this is a move that MS is taking against the trend. In an age when beta has been free forever, will this new move inspire other big companies to do the same? In that case, hearken ye all thou software makers - the number of beta testers will come to an unprecedented decline if thou shalt start to impose fee for beta products in the future. All hail - free beta! All hail - free beta!

Comments

Anonymous said…

no the beta is free. what we are charging for is the download infrastructure quality. Bandwidth is not free when you have this amount of data transfer. Check my blog for more comment at http://blogs.msdn.com/officerocker

2:48 AM

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