Australian Students Can Get Office at 95% Off Retail

tora201 writes "Microsoft Australia is offering university students in that country Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition for just $75 Australian dollars, a 95% discount off the usual retail price. Alternatively students can buy a one year renewable license at just $25, or download a trial version that can be later activated. Eligibility is determined through a valid Australian university e-mail address with payment made via credit card."

Dupe!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Dupe - and the original story [slashdot.org] was much funnier - it covered MS's promotional site being flagged as a phishing site by MS's own IE7.

You idiot!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I linked to the article I was commenting on.

Dupe article is here. [slashdot.org]

Actually not the best deal...

[F-3582]

...you know, there is a computer education program for school teachers by Intel [intel.com] which certainly exists in other countries, too. Participating nets you a free copy of Microsoft Office (a few years ago this was Office 2000 Premium) under some special license. Actually it is no license at all, because the package says "Non-licensed software! Don't use without separate license by Microsoft!"

Re:Discounted software

[EvanED]

Funny how often the US gets to bear the brunt of development costs while the rest of the world gets deep discounts

I can download, free of charge, any of the following products:
MapPoint 2004
OneNote 2003
Project 2002 and 2003
Virtual PC 2004
Vision 2002 and 2003
Visual Studio 6, .NET 2003, and .NET 2005 (and the MSDN library)
Windows Vista Business, XP Professional, and Server 2003 Enterprise

For free, legally. Other university departments have SQL Server, Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise, Access 2007, and others.

It's not just other countries getting the discounts. The *student* part is much more important.

Re:Discounted software

[xtracto]

Funny how often the US gets to bear the brunt of development costs while the rest of the world gets deep discounts.
Ha! You should live in the UK a bit my friend. They are so used to get raped on the ass by the prices that they lost the repulsion long ago.

The added security seems to come with a high anoyance factor
I have not tried Windows Vista, but for what I have read and saw, it seems to me the guys at Redmond chose the less-work way to add security. So, at the end they chose to leave security as a chose to the user (with the infamous accept or cancel hundreds of screens). I really hope this is what they only mean by improved security because it is exactly the same as it was in XP. Just with more questions to the users.

It seems to me that Microsoft made with Windows Vista what I did as a kid for my homework, they assign you a homework on Monday for the next Monday, and you do not do nothing until Sunday afternoon when you read about the assignment and realize you *need* more time to do some research on the subject (lets say that the homework was to ask several people what do they think about Coke) and you just try to write something that seems to be OK just to pass the mark.

But then again, looking back at the previous Windows releases, I remember when the Windows Millennium Edition was going to be released how it was supposed to have the NT kernel and to be more stable than anything else but oh fiasco, it was Win98 with a new desktop background. And then Win2000 came out for the servers without any further and after that WindowsXP which again was Win2000 with Internet Explorer and pretty themes.

Fucking hardware manufacturers PROVIDE LINUX DRIVERS!!!! we do not care if they are closed!

Re:But the sad thing is...

[GreatDrok]

A few years back I was between proper jobs and had to do some temping work. The temping agency asked if I could use Office. I didn't know as I had only used OpenOffice as I had been a Linux user since 1994 and before that I was on SunOS. Anyway, I knew OpenOffice pretty well at the time so I figured it would be interesting to see how well I did in their Office proficiency test. They set it up for Office XP and away I went. The funny thing was that they tested my ability to find things in the menu within a couple of tries and didn't let me use keyboard shortcuts. Despite this, the interface of Word was so similar to what I knew from OpenOffice 1.x that I was able to pass the test easily with what they said was a very high score. Some of the really specific functions in Office versus OpenOffice differ in their placement or what they are called but most are close enough that a user of one will be perfectly able to use the other. This is why schools should encourage the use of OpenOffice. This massive discount is a cyncical attempt by MS to get students so used to Office that they won't consider anything else.

On a similar note, I recently bought my Mum a MacBook and just gave it to her. She has never used anything other than Windows but even without training she was able to find her way around but recently she was struggling to get Word to format some pictures properly on the page so I suggested she use the trial copy of Pages. She was amazingly difficult to convince to try and use anything other than Office, even though she happily used OpenOffice on her Windows box but eventually she tried it and a few minutes in she was suddenly very enthusiastic about it. In the end, what MS wants to do is get people scared of trying anything else. Ever. Teaching people only to use Windows and MS applications from an early age is key to this strategy and it is a cycle that needs to be broken if we are ever to have people who can really function in the face of alternative software. MS has been so successful that people often struggle when moving from one Windows machine to another simply because an icon is in a different place. That just sucks.

Re:$1500 ?

[deniable]

Yeah, I missed one. Ultimate is A$1175. And for extra sticker shock Vista Ultimate is A$750.