The Hindu : A surprise in store for `discount' buyers?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 20, 2003

National

National

A surprise in store for `discount' buyers?

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE AUG. 19. Those who take up Microsoft's recent offer of slashed prices in India, on its "Office XP" product may not know that the next version of the suite of applications — `Office 2003' — is likely to be out within weeks, forcing them to upgrade again at considerable cost.

They won't know because Microsoft is not telling any one officially — but its release scheduled seems to have been `leaked' by the normal business process adapted by one of their biggest resellers: The British version of the world's biggest online bookshop, Amazon .com (www.amazon.co.uk) this week put up prices of all four versions of Office 2003 — and what's more, it gives the release date as October 24. This appears to be correct because Microsoft has posted an invitation to U.K.-based IT companies to attend a preview of the new office product exactly one month ahead of this date: on September 24.

In early August, the Indian end of the U.S. software giant announced a 15 per cent cut in prices of the current version OfficeXP, soon after a similar country-specific discount in China. This may well have persuaded many users here to go in for the product, which they could not afford earlier: Standard and Professional versions were earlier available for Rs. 17,500 and Rs. 25,700.

But if Microsoft releases the new `Office 2003' in October as seems likely, then customers will have to again pay almost what they paid for the discounted version, merely to upgrade it. This becomes clear by an analysis of the prices posted by Amazon: $688 equivalent for the 2003 Professional edition; $618 for the new Small Business edition; $536 for the Standard Edition. The last contains the four core applications: the word processor "Word", the spreadsheet "Excel", the presentation tool "Powerpoint" and the email agent "Outlook".

Assuming that the vast majority of lay users will go in for this edition, they may again have to fork out around Rs. 15,000 merely to upgrade from the Office XP to the `Office 2003' version. The upgrade cost is quoted at $321.

And there may be no option but to upgrade — because the new Office for the first time, includes tight integration with the new web language version — extended Markup Language (XML) — which will soon become the de facto standard for Internet documents. A clear indication from Microsoft of when it planned to release `Office 2003' might have given Indian customers the option of waiting for it rather than falling for `discounted offers'.

Next desktop Windows

Another fact that emerges is that the next upgrade to the desktop operating system Windows XP cannot be expected for another year or 18 months. Windows XP was released in December 2001 and the first Service Pack (SP1) bundling all updates and patches dates back to November 2002. eWeek reported on Sunday that Microsoft has pushed back the release date for the next service pack (SP2) by about a year to the third quarter of 2004.

This information is available only to those who look regularly at the Product Lifescyle page of the Microsoft website (www.microsoft.com/ windows/ lifecycle/ servicepacks.mspx).

The same page also warns those who may still be using Windows 98 that after January 16, 2004, the software will enter what is called "non support

Hase" — jargon that means free updates and patches will not be available.

As the saying goes, "you have been warned!"

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