Ben's Blog World: Microsoft goes for six of a kind, prepares new Office 2010 for small biz

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Microsoft goes for six of a kind, prepares new Office 2010 for small biz

Straight out of the "you can never have enough SKUs" files, Microsoft appears to be prepping a new flavor of Office 2010 for release next month.

Dubbed Office Small Business Basics 2010, the package will include Word, Excel, OneNote, and Outlook. Make that probably includes, because there's not a whole lot of information about SBB on the Web apart from recent speculation that it's about to be released. There's a one-line nod to it on this Microsoft page, where you'll see it crammed in amongst all the other Office 2010 bits.

In fairness to Microsoft, the additional SKU actually does make sense. With so many different purchase options available for Office 2010 -- like those looks-like-a-prepaid-phone-card-but-isn't activation cards -- why not offer as many different combinations of the core Office apps as they think consumers may want? It's also pretty clear that the goal with Office 2010 is to get everyone using it -- whether they pay for it or not (Starter, Office Web... ).

In all honesty, the inclusion of PowerPoint in the small business versions was kind of a mystery to me -- though maybe that's because most of the customers I support during the day have a hard enough time staying on top of Word and Excel, let alone mastering a presentation app.

[via ZDNet]