What? Microsoft planning to charge for Office 12 Beta!

What? Microsoft planning to charge for Office 12 Beta!

Software giants Microsoft have done something unthinkable yet again. The company now plans to charge a nominal fee for Office 2007 Beta 2 downloads.

This is unlike most other companies, which rely on user feedback on beta releases to get bugs squashed before the final version is released in the market.

Microsoft plans to charge $1.50 per download for their Microsoft Office 12 Beta 2 from this coming Wednesday.

A company representative said: “Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times…That’s 500 percent more than what was expected. The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers.”

He added: “This is the first time Microsoft has charged for an Office beta, and it’s not something that is planned for on a repeat basis.”

This makes little sense to us at TechWhack. They want users to checkout their software for bugs and they want them to pay for doing the testing? If the world’s richest company cannot afford to allow consumers to test out their applications for them, who can!