upgrade from Visio 2002 to Visio 2010?

MS no longer offers discounted upgrades for loyal customers. They figure they have us all well adicted so now all Office 2010 licenses are full price, standalone licenses (independent of "upgrade from" applications).

MS has introduced a new discount "scam" called "Product Key Cards".  I call them a "scam" because these are trivially discounted licenses have 2 severe limitations that most buyers are not aware of until it is too late.  One is that the license is good for instalaltion on only one machine. Retail licenes allow installation on 2 or 3 machines.  And the PKC license is completely tied to the first hardware it is installed on, no transfer rights. When the hardware dies, so does the license, even if the hardware is replaced on warantee, the Office license has to be purchased AGAIN.  Retail licenses allow installations to be "transferred" to new computers over time.

The second method of purchasing is online download of retail licenses.  Not bad, but the price is the same as the boxed retail version. Which means you pay a $30 premium to get the "backup" disk.  Also, too many buyers are not aware that they can log back in to redo download. The second problem with this license is that the downloads are not going to be avaialbe forever. 2003 is no longer avaiable, and a couple of people have suggested (unconfirmed) that the 2007 downloads are no longer avaiaible.

My personal prefernce is to buy the boxed retail CD version.

Here is link to online store for Office bundles: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Office\_Category\_Page

Here is link to online store for individual apps: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/list/parentCategoryID.37286600/categoryID.50726400