TechRadar and a billion other sites confirm Microsoft won’t be offering any upgrade pricing for Office 2010. In the UK, you’ll pay £109.99 for Office Home and Student version, £239.99 for Office Home and Business and £399.99 for Office Professional, which reportedly comes with an aversion to actual work, a slick hair-do and a propensity for leering after digital secretaries.

Microsoft’s reasoning is that “Office Home & Business 2010 represents a substantial saving over [the] comparative Office Standard 2007 suite while including an additional application (OneNote) and Office Web Apps” and claims “the majority of users will immediately benefit from the greater value and simplified setup experience offered by Product Key Cards”. The lack of an upgrade path has nothing to do with Microsoft “wanting more of your money, scumbag users who are locked into our product and yet don’t realise they don’t really need to upgrade if they’re happy with what they have—mwahahahaha”, or “sticking our fingers in our ears and going lalalalalalalalala, I can’t hear you, whenever OpenOffice.org and other dangerous competing products are mentioned”.

The BBC reports that 24 large phone operators are ganging up to give Apple a smack. The Wholesale Applications Community is aiming to offer its own take on the App Store, presumably because they want a tasty slice of profits pie.

On reading the BBC’s article, it’s hard to tell whether this is a profits grab or a genuine stab for the future of apps. The article talks about building and selling apps “irrespective of device or technology”, which could mean advanced open web apps or web apps dumbed down to work in any old system. Likewise for the quote about overcoming market fragmentation by creating a single “open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users”.

Long-term, web apps are a good bet. As JavaScript and HTML evolves, browser-based environments will be able to do more and more. At the present time, though, to truly support “all mobile phone users,” you’ve no choice but to drag devices down to the lowest common denominator—and when consortiums of this sort are born, compromise usually forces hands, to the point that exciting and visionary aims are ditched in favour of short-term market-share and profits. Here’s hoping that’s not the case here.

Update: John Nack of Adobe posts on his blog, strongly refuting the claim.

Since Steve Jobs demoed the iPad, showing quite blatantly that it didn’t support Flash, the backlash has been severe. Lots of (frankly stupid) journos have blathered on about how no Flash spells doom for Apple’s device, forgetting that people don’t care about technology—they just care about what you can do with it. In other words, Flash isn’t important, but the things you can do with it are. Flash is mostly used for games, ads, video and overblown interactive websites. Right now, popular Flash-originated games already exist on the App Store (often for free), everyone hates ads, video services are transitioning to open standards and overblown interfaces can go die in a fire.

But despite what some claim, Apple’s rather brutal stance as far as the web goes isn’t to block competition, but to push open standards, rather than proprietary ones. People forget that Flash isn’t open—it’s just very popular. Somehow, even many geeks are OK with this, despite the fact they rallied against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for being in much the same position fairly recently.

Perhaps the difference in reaction to Microsoft and Adobe was down to the former’s appalling business practices, using its ‘unfair’ advantage to bully the competition into submission. Sadly, it appears Adobe’s now overstepped this mark. Various sources reported yesterday that Adobe has blocked the latest publication of HTML5 (AppleInsider), the standard that could knock Flash down a peg or 20.

This revelation comes off the back of months of regular comments from Adobe about the importance of supporting open standards. Nonetheless, if there’s any truth to the linked article (and similar ones doing the rounds) it appears Adobe’s narked about the ‘canvas’ element in HTML5, which is a direct threat to Flash. What Adobe should do is start work on some amazing authoring tools to create content for HTML5, rather than trying to slow its ascent and keep Flash in the spotlight for longer. As Microsoft will tell you, a company can only hold back the tide for so long, and the tech community holds grudges for many years.

Answer: unrealistic expectations followed by inevitable disappointment.

In the meantime, feel free to re-read How to update your online store, the Apple way.

Over the past 24 hours, lots of publications have reported on a stupid Vodafone employee posting an inappropriate and homophobic message to the company’s Twitter feed.

Perhaps surprisingly, the media didn’t erupt in a frenzy of “social networking is evil” rants, although, inevitably, a number of individuals are claiming they’ll cancel their Vodafone accounts, due to the incident.

Personally, I think such people are idiots. Yes, the comment posted was unsavoury, but I tend to think you find out a lot about a company by how it deals with problems such as this. Vodafone could so easily have established a PR smokescreen, or it could have lied and claimed its feed was hacked. Instead, it told the truth. It said one of its staff (now suspended) had posted the message, and it replied and publicly apologised on Twitter to everyone asking about what had happened.

I don’t have any day-to-day dealings with Vodafone, and so I cannot comment on the quality and standards of the company in general. However, in the manner in which this incident was dealt with, I don’t really see how anyone could have asked for anything more, perhaps bar Vodafone management taking a little more interest in exactly who has access to the (usually very helpful) Twitter feed.