14 DAY TRIAL // While still far from Microsoft’s largest Beta testing pool for a developing product, which belonged to Windows 7, Office 2010 is by all means holding its own. According to statistics offered by the Redmond company, at less than two months since it was released to early adopters, Office 2010 public Beta was downloaded in excess of 2 million times. By comparison, by the end of Windows 7’s development process, pre-release variants of the operating system had been downloaded by over 8 million testers around the world.
“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,” revealed Rachel Bondi, general manager, Microsoft Office.
Just as it was the case for Windows 7, Microsoft is not limiting in the least the number of downloads of Office 2010. Released in November 2009 at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Office 2010 Beta Build 14.0.4536.1000 continues to be available for download even at this point in time. Users that haven’t grabbed the Beta milestone yet better make sure they’re not missing out. “Most importantly, 9 out of 10 beta users feel that the Office 2010 beta is an improvement over their current productivity suite,” Bondi stated.
Since the official release of Build 14.0.4536.1000, a new development milestone of Office 2010 is available for download. At the end of the past week, Office 2010 Build 14.0.4730.1007 was leaked and made available for download by various third-party sources including torrent trackers. According to the End User License Agreement, Office 2010 Build 14.0.4730.1007 belongs to the RTM branch of the next version of Office. The RTM Build of Office 2010 is expected in April 2010, with general availability reportedly set before the end of June 2010.
Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.