Office Starter 2010 is a reduced-functionality, advertising-supported version of Office 2010, available exclusively on new PCs. Office Starter 2010 will provide new PC owners with immediate exposure to the Office 2010 experience on new PCs right out of the box.

Office Starter 2010 will include Office Word Starter 2010 and Office Excel Starter 2010, with the basic functionality for creating, viewing and editing documents. Office Starter 2010 will replace Microsoft Works, offering a consistent Office user experience, such as the Ribbon, with a simple path to upgrade to a fully-featured version of Office 2010 directly from within the product.

Microsoft also noted that Office 2007 Home and Student edition has been the top selling PC software title at US retail for the last two years.

The entire Office 2010 Home & Student suite will be installed with new OEM Windows 7 machines, however the suite will be crippled to the ad supported Starter version until you purchase a key card that will be available in retail market.

So I see two things here:

1. The software is there so a crack will be out in no time…
2. If Starter is all a person needs, there is a waste of storage space used by the remainder of the installation files.

Sources [Microsoft Technet Blog, CNet]

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