Office 2010 Starter For OEMs At $2 With Conditions

Update: Mentioned Office 2010 ‘Starter’ in the title.

Over at ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley has some interesting information regarding how much PC makers will be charged for bundling Office 2010 Starter Edition.

Asides: With the introduction of Office 2010, Microsoft has discontinued Microsoft Works and replaced with Office 2010 Starter. To the end-user Office 2010 Starter is free and comes with ad supported Word 2010 and Excel 2010 only.

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As I said, to the user the Starter SKU is free, however for the manufacturers it is not. Microsoft is offering Office 2010 Starters for as low as $2 provided they bundle Windows Live Essentials and the Bing Bar on the PC. If however the manufacturer decides not to, the cost of Office 2010 Starter is $5. The slide that explains this:

To the user this does not make much of a difference as they have the ability to upgrade to any of the mainstream Office 2010 SKUs using the Product Key Cards. These Key Cards come without the install media and are cheaper. In an earlier post, Mary Jo had pointed out the effective price difference in Office 2010:

Office 2010 Professional Plus goes up 4%
Office 2010 Standard stays the same

Project 2010 and Project 2010 Pro each go up 10%
Project Server 2010 goes up 10%
Project Server Client Access License (CAL) remains the same

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise CAL goes up 10%; Standard CAL remains the same
SharePoint Server 2010 Server license goes up 10%
SharePoint Server for Internet Sites Enterprise remains the same
Enterprise CAL Suite goes up 2.5%

Ed Bott has a great post on how you can get Office 2010 at rock bottom prices.

(h/t Neowin)