Office Starter 2010 : pre-installed with others for a cheaper price

OEM manufacturers will pay $2 for an Office Starter 2010 license if they pre-install it on new PC’s also with Bing bar, Windows Live Essentials. Otherwise the copy will cost $5.

The Office Starter 2010 suite is planned to succeed Works. It provides limited function versions of Word and Excel 2010 allowing you to read, edit and create documents in Open XML and ODF formats.

The compatibility of this Office 2010 release is up to standard, although not everything is perfect. An example of this is documents which contain macros, as these will open although the macro will be disabled. Among the other limits, it is impossible to automatically create a summery, and dynamically crossed tables are missing.

Office Starter 2010 is also billed as being an entry point into Office 2010 for users that want to upgrade their version in just a few clicks of the mouse. This suite is free for the end user, with untargeted advertising appearing (unrelated to the content in the open documents). Every 45 seconds, advertising messages will appear.


Cheaper for OEM assemblers if they pre-install it
Office Starter 2010 will only be delivered with new PC’s. For computer manufacturers, this pre-installation will have a cost which ZDNet has already documented in the United States. With a minimum of 10 licenses ordered, they will pay 5 dollars per license.

Nevertheless, if the manufacturers also pre-install Windows Live Essentials (Windows Live Mail, Messenger, Writer, Picture Gallery...), the Bing toolbar and configures the Web browser to use Bing as the search engine and the MSN welcome page as the defaults, than the price goes down to 2 dollars per licence. This is certainly an interesting reduction for a manufacturer who orders a lot of Office Starter 2010 licenses.