Office, Vista "too expensive" for SMEs

MICROSOFT'S latest upgrade to Office is failing to interest small and medium businesses because it is too pricy, analysts say.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Meredith Thompson, managing director of business software advisory service Software Choice, said most of Vole's added features were not of interest to SMEs because they got all they really needed from earlier versions of Office.

She said SMEs are staying away in droves because Office is a lot more expensive and facing competition from free open sauceware.

Although there is some upgrade interest from Vole's corporate customers, sky-high pricing is killing the product in the SME market.

The price tag of $690 to $1150 for a Vista office combo was just too high.

If punters drag their feet upgrading to Vista and Office they might just say, sod this for a game of soldiers and try Linux and Open Office instead. µ

Clarification
Initially, we erroneously attributed Meredith's comments to another analyst, David Hanrahan, of South African firm Dimension Data. In fact, David said larger corporations were quite interested in Office, if not so enthused by Vista. We'd like to apologise to David for the error.