Microsoft Office for under forty quid?
Posted 8 October 2007 at 12:21PM by Simon Dickson in IT systems and support
As a special offer, it surely falls into the 'too good to be true' category. A copy of Microsoft Office 2007, the Ultimate edition with everything - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Outlook, the lot. All for £38.95? You're probably thinking it's a dodgy Far East pirate, but you'd be wrong.
It's a completely genuine Microsoft offer, but of course there's a catch. You have to be a student - meaning, you have to have a valid .ac.uk email address, and be in higher education (undergraduate or postgraduate), or further education with 'at least 15 hours of scheduled contact time'. If you can't prove your status, you're liable to pay the full price for the product: that's a penny under £600.
Whilst any student discount is undoubtedly welcome - or rather, would have been welcome when I was still a student, it's another layer of complexity on top of Microsoft's often baffling licensing policy. If you search dabs.com for 'microsoft office 2007', you'll find 69 Microsoft products: various combinations of applications, on CD, DVD or no disk at all, with prices from £75 to nearly £500. Which is the one you're looking for?
The most obvious starting point is the Home And Student Edition, which comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It costs under £100, and you're allowed to install the programs on up to three PCs in your household: but commercial use is prohibited.
If you want to use the 'big three' for for business purposes, you're looking at the Standard Edition, which typically costs nearer £300: then there's the Small Business Edition, the Professional edition, the Professional Plus edition, the Ultimate edition - and so it goes on. That's before you enter the murky world of Volume Licensing, which they recommend for 'companies that have as few as five desktop PCs'.
For all that, there's no denying that the £38.95 offer for everything is exceptionally good value. Or is there? It's a global campaign - and US students get the same deal for just £29.60 at today's exchange rate. Sacre bleu - even our European cousins get it a few quid cheaper.
You know what? The more difficult they make it, the more likely people are to opt out completely, and go with one of the free office software suites.
Tags: bargain, discount, further education, higher education, microsoft, office 2007, students
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Comments
2. At October 8, 2007 10:58 PM, Scot wrote:
Back when I was at uni, most people I knew who weren't in the Science, Engineering or Medical faculties didn't have 15 hours of contact time after second year. One of my friends who studying "Political Economy" had a single one hour tutorial a week in the final year. That 15 hour minimum might lock out a lot of students
3. At October 10, 2007 4:36 PM, Tim Marshall wrote:
Are you seriously expecting that many people to opt for the freebee office suites (Open Office and the like)? With niggling compatability issues and with the world and his wife using Uncle Bills products I can't see it. Even I have dumped Lotus in favour of Office. Why? Because everyone else uses it :-)
4. At October 11, 2007 1:53 PM, anjanesh wrote:
' Frebie ' software are more poplular that you think.
As long as people contribute to thier efforts in developing open source software it will continue to grow; just because everyone uses it does'nt mean it is the best.
If a price were to be put on those'Frebie ' software you would notice that it is actually more expensive given the development efforts put in by people .What open source lacks in marketing it makes up in quality.
Best file formats and stable platforms emerge from the open source movement.
XML the orginal file format promoted by Open Office is now being promoted by office 2007;Almost all web technologies are built on open source and with the move to web 2.0 - computer based applications may no longer be important anymore.
Opensource development is in more places than you care to notice.
5. At October 11, 2007 2:56 PM, Gary Stephen wrote:
My fiancee is a teacher and we picked up a copy of Office 2005 Teacher and Student Edition at the start of the year for £75. At no point have we ever been asked to prove that she is a teacher. I'm sure this must be a route that less honest people could exploit and am surprised that Microsoft left such an obvious opening.
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1. At October 8, 2007 3:50 PM, Anjanesh wrote: