Weeelllllllp....Pay for a Beta? How much?

[christopher_wolf]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/31 ... etas_cost/

Just when you thought Beta Culture couldn't get any worse, Microsoft is happy to charge you for the privlege of testing their not-quite-ready software and keeping a journal of bugs found.

[Torque]

1,50$ is cheap for having a complete office package.

I currently run the office 2007 pro beta, downloaded for free @Microsoft.com
Works just fine. I use it practically every day and not a single crash so far. I would gladly pay the 1,50$ for using it. If they charged half the retail cost, I wouldnt touch it though.

[dsigma6]

$1.50! thats out of this world! for such an insane price, id just stick with openoffice.

[Legionnaire]

Microsoft can't charge for a beta product. It may restrict downloads to a very limited (invitation-only) group of beta testers. But charging for something that may have bugs or missing features or change in the future, in other words that is incomplete, can only be interpreted as a joke!

[christopher_wolf]

I don't quite think the fee is bad enough to make me switch to Open Office (part of my doomsday/time-for-cyanide scenario which includes buying a dell, getting addicted to RSS feeds, blogging about the bowel movements of myself and any pets I happen I to be babysitting at the time, actually *thinking * that Web 2.0 is a good idea, and correcting the punctuation in online Wikis for most of the day...but I digress). I can typeset anything far better than that with Vi and LaTeX.

Still, why should I apy to test a product that has bugs, a main feature of the beta process if I recall correctly, that will only go up in price later on?

[Torque]

Well, I installed the 2007 (usually im a 2003 user) out of curiousity. And if MS wanted to charge me 1,50$ for the download, I wouldnt worry. Its not like its gonna blow the budget.
I get the principal - it is wrong to pay for a BETA product. However, when the fee is that low, I just dont care.
If they charged like 10$ it wouldnt be worth the effort.

[BillMorrow]

perhaps the fee is just a way to sort out the frivolous downloaders from the real people..
(please don't take me to task as to who comprises frivolous from real people)

the thing is, just as my thought on charging a signup fee, here, would be based on the fact that the bad guys won't pay even $3 to bug the forum, same they won't pay M$ $1.50 to do nasty things to office 2007..

which, BTW, has to be a huge download..!

[BillMorrow]

LaTeX..?

[christopher_wolf]

Yup; LaTeX

Combined with Vi (and/or TeXnic center or any other TeX IDE of your choice) it makes an awesome way to typeset documents, reports, articles, mathematical formulae, etc.