Since being released a mere seven weeks ago, the Microsoft Office 2010 beta has been downloaded more than 2 million times, according to information from the MS Office team. This is somewhat astounding given the growing popularity of Google Apps, OpenOffice and other freely available solutions. However, the Office team has some perspective that they posted on their blog in preparation for CES.

According to the site, the current Office Home & Student Edition is hugely popular:

* According to the NPD Group, Office Home and Student was the number one selling PC software product — including games! — at retail in the U.S. during the week of Black Friday 2009.
* Office Home and Student was one of Amazon.com’s top 3 Hot Holiday Bestseller software products in 2009.

As for the upcoming Office 2010:

Meanwhile the Office 2010 beta is generating record interest and use, surpassing the previous Office 2007 beta download rate. In just seven weeks, more than two million people around the world have downloaded and are using the Office 2010 beta. To get a better appreciation for that number, it’s a rate of more than 40,000 downloads per day. That’s approximately twice the number of people who run the Boston Marathon each year, or the entire population of Olympia, WA, or Annapolis, MD, downloading the Office 2010 beta every day!

It is interesting that Office 2010 is doing better than Office 2007, especially given the market fragmentation and move to web-based apps. My personal and work Office versions are 2003, and my only exposure to Office 2007 was during a 3 month contract position a couple of years ago – and I found it a pretty lousy experience! But I am now running the Office 2010 beta on my netbook and it works very nicely for the light word processing and spreadsheet tasks I need it for, which seems to echo a final thought from the Office team:

Most importantly, 9 out of 10 beta users feel that the Office 2010 beta is an improvement over their current productivity suite.

While I get emails from TechNet, what triggered me to visit this time was the discussion at ReadWriteWeb about the popularity of Office 2010. Opinions range from ‘Microsoft has listened and done well’ to ‘people are dumb sheep’ and everything in between. Personally I use both Office and Google Apps quite heavily and see applications for each.

What about you? What are your thoughts on the Office beta … or Microsoft … or office apps in general?

Source: ReadWriteWeb