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As per the recent news on MS charging for Betas, would the members here at CF pay for Betas? or even if it is not for M$

 

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OMG we talking of mega rich MS here... and they charging 1.50 to download beta office... ok this has made my day!

hang on if 1 million people pay thats 1.5 million and 2 million thats 3 million - is MS try to make money out of this? You can download trials of anything for a while now and all of a sudden its Office 2007 lets make some money off the crazy nutters who will pay?

 

dammit! could someone change option two to "Yes, but reluctantly" please!

 

I voted No, but after reading the link I can understand MS's point so I guess I would say that it sounds reasonable.

 

You too often get a beta with full-priced software, you shouldn't have to pay for the real betas as well.

 

I still think its crazy talk, the beta-testers are doing M$ a favour, by helping to get the bugs out of the program. If we, well the beta-tester have to pay for downloading the file (using M$ bandwith) then the tester should counter-charge M$ and say they are using their bandwidth (they are paying for Broadband) to download the file... it could get into a right mess, as the ISP's might want some aswell...

every little helps!

 

Maybe we should charge MS for every bug we find in their betas! That would balance the books!

 

you know these results speak for themselves and me a MS centric forum...

 

you want us to end up richer than bill?

 

I wouldn't mind

 

There is a private medical lab in south wales that pay people to sit around, play pool, eat pizza, watch telly and play computer games until all hours of the morning and pay you! They don't charge you for food or your accomodation but pay a very reasonable wage.

I believe they are researching in to sleep and energy patterns.

That is why i voted no.

Si

 

Have you got the name of the lab?

 

I don't sorry. It came up in a conversation in the pub about a fortnight ago

Si

 

Gutted thought I was in for a right little earner there


I agree with the poll, MS should either offer the beta with free download and count the bandwidth that is used as a small price to pay for the level of expertise and experience that the public beta testers bring to bear on the software; or just get better in-house testers and not offer a beta download at all.


Seems fairly simple to me, but then again I am a bit simple myself

 

I don't remember the name but is quite popular with Cardiff uni students. My mate almost signed up but we managed to talk him out of it. He could've ended up with a swollen head like those guys the other week.

 

The Beta of Office 2007 is bug ridden and if you download it onto your main PC it will change the outlook.pst file in such a way that you can't go back to a previous version.

Only download beta software for evaluation and testing purposes, and no, do not pay for being a tester and potentially messing your system up.

 

For those who actually download beta programs, do you run them under a virtual pc/vm ware or do you install them straight onto your pc? When im testing apps i always run them under a Virtual PC so they dont mess up my pc...

 

That is good advice TCM

 

I can understand Microsofts point in this, not everyone who downloads the beta is going to turn in a bug report. There are a lot of people who will download it to play around with it and check it out but otherwise not report to Microsoft of any problems they encounter or they don't use it log enough to do so.

There are others who will download the beta and never install it, they just download it to have it, some call them software collectors, I once knew a guy who would download any and all software that he could get a hold of (warez basically); the large majority of the software he downloaded he never used, just backed up onto tape.

Microsoft's charge is to cover the cost of the download but also weed out those who are not serious about doing actual beta testing.

GW