71 MB per day = The true cost of using Microsoft Office

September last year, I installed Microsoft Office on my Macbook Pro. Now I’ve been an Office user since the late 1990’s and have grown to love (or get habituated to) the suite. I didn’t have to buy it for my Mac though, because Microsoft gives away a few licenses (administered via MSDN) as part of its “BizSpark” program for startups.

The entire Office suite was “free”, as in beer. Or so I thought.

Because just 3 weeks later I was prompted to download an update. The size of the update? 3.2 GB.

“Oh well, maybe they discovered some really critical bugs or came up with some really useful features,” I thought.

All for another 3 weeks.

6 GB worth of “updates” in just 7 weeks was crazy. What was Microsoft up to?

Whatever it was, they clearly weren’t done. Because 5 weeks later…

And 6 weeks later…

…and 8 weeks (only 8 weeks? Yaay!) later.

…and today…

In case you weren’t keeping count (I mean, who could?), that’s six updates in 6 months. Which in itself isn’t a bad thing (because the alternative would be buggy and insecure software), except when you add up the data involved: 12.5 GB.

Which means I was literally downloading 71 MB of data *every day* as a Microsoft Office user. Wow! (This is not counting the few times when the updates stopped due to some issue, and had to be restarted.)

Once again, I’ll let that sink in: the true cost of “using” (or “owning”) Microsoft Office for me was 71 MB per day.

Thankfully, I have a fairly fast and high-cap broadband connection at home and office, so this didn’t really pinch my pocket that badly. But for the large majority of Indians who are on low-speed, capped broadband plans, what must 71 MB per day translate to in terms of Rs.?

Wouldn’t lay users therefore just prefer to use Google Docs (which, obviously, can update itself as frequently as it wants with no cost to the user)?

To end, I’d love to decode why this happened. I’ve been an Office and Windows user for a long time and have never seen updates as aggressive as this. Is this something to do with Office on Mac perhaps? Or are MSDN users subject to more frequent updates as compared to regular users?