James Bannan29 November 2006, 10:23 AM
Microsoft is so keen for early adopters and tech influencers to learn about the benefits of Vista and Office 2007 that it is giving full copies of it away.
 Microsoft's "Power Together" website: anyone (in the US) who watches three promotional videos can claim their free copy of Vista Business and Office Professional 2007. |
Microsoft is so keen to get Vista and Office 2007 into the hands of early adopters, it is giving copies away.
If you can handle sitting through three videos on each of Vista and Office 2007 explaining their new features, Microsoft will reward you with a free copy of Vista Business and/or Office Professional 2007.
No, it’s not a joke. The promotion, which is running till February, is called PowerTogether, and it is obviously designed to ensure that tech enthusiasts have a thorough understanding of the new functionality in both Vista and Office 2007 so they can convince neanderthal "Office 97 is good enough for me" managers to upgrade.
As a result, there's also going to be a heck of a lot of people out there running Office 2007 and generating (and emailing) documents in its new, and non-backward-compatible file formats.
Blind Freddy can tell that there's going to be corporate resistance to takeup of Office 2007 because of the dramatically changed user interface and file formats that are incompatible with the rest of the world.
We might be cynical, but this seems like a clever way to get a large corpus of people generating documents that everyone using an older version of Office won't be able to open. (Caveat: there is an Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003.)
It’s not a bad little marketing idea from Microsoft though – getting people to watch tutorials and how-tos about a product and then send them a fully-functional copy. However, the length of the promotion -- three months -- is a rather extraordinary risk to actually, you know, selling the product.
There's a very weird video on YouTube promoting the promotion: it's weird in a kind of way that only one of the world's largest PR companies could think up. You can watch it here.
There's a teeny-weeny catch though: it's only available to those who live in the US. If you’re not fortunate enough to be a citizen in the Land of the Free don’t feel too miffed – even Canada missed out. And all of Europe too – you know, the place where all the history comes from?
We asked Microsoft Australia what it was doing for us yokels, and the answer was a deafening silence. But then again, Microsoft was gearing up for its media and analyst launch of the two products in Australia tomorrow (featuring Uncle Vamos and the senior executive crew), so our enquiry may not have gone straight to the top of the list.
It strikes us that using a US-based mail forwarder could work around the US-only limitation entirely. Not that we'd suggest playing the system like that in the absence of an equivalent offer for Aussies...