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Under a promotional subscription program that Microsoft is offering through June 30, small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) are being offered half off on first-year licensing fees if they to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional and/or Office 2010.
The program, called Microsoft’s ‘Up to Date Discount’, provides customers with Open Value subscriptions 50% off their first year payments on the desktop OS and productivity suite. According to ChannelWeb, customers in the program can upgrade to Windows 7 Professional for $35 in the first year while a first-year license for Office 2007 Professional would cost $91.
Microsoft is planning to launch Office 2010 in June, with Office Home and Business set to retail for $279 for a boxed product and $199 with a product key card. Until then, the upgrade offer applies to customers who are running versions as old as Office XP Professional. Once Office 2010 begins shipping, the discount will only be available to customers running Office 2003 Professional.
It’s a shrewd yet essential move by Microsoft. The software giant is facing growing competition in the SMB space from Google Apps, a relatively inexpensive cloud-based tools suite which includes documents and spreadsheets.
Meanwhile, Windows continues to lose OS market share. According to a new report from Net Applications, a Web analytics and metrics provider, Windows ended 2009 with a 92.3% share, down 0.3% from the previous month. This marked the eighth month in 2009 that Windows lost share, according to Computerworld.
Although rival desktop operating systems Mac OS and Linux remained flat last month, mobile operating systems including Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone OS made strong gains, even though they continue to represent a small percentage of the market.
Nevertheless, the continued success of Office largely remains tied to Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop OS space. With Google gaining share in the cloud, Microsoft has to play to its strengths.
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