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Microsoft IT

Australian Students Can Get Office at 95% Off Retail 246

Posted by samzenpus from the almost-free dept.
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."
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Australian Students Can Get Office at 95% Off Retail More

Australian Students Can Get Office at 95% Off Retail

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  • Dupe! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Whiney Mac Fanboy ( 963289 ) * <whineymacfanboy@gmail.com> on Thursday March 08, 2007 @05:55AM (#18273992) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • But the sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Thursday March 08, 2007 @05:59AM (#18274016) Homepage
    Dupe or not, the sad thing is there are lots of students clueless enough to think that they need MS Office when 99% of them can do all they need with OpenOffice.org.

    • Re:But the sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by W2k ( 540424 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:04AM (#18274046) Journal
      But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice. Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience. In this sense, the students being allowed to buy Office 2007 for cheap is a Good Thing for them.

      Now, perhaps most companies running Office 2003/2007 could also have managed with OpenOffice, but that argument is not going to help a job-seeking student...

      • Re:But the sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:15AM (#18274100) Homepage

        But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice. Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience.

        The vast majority of Office users never really use more than a very limited subset of the available features. A univeristy level student should be able to pick those up in a span of a few days, if familiar with Office applications in general.

        If you're aiming for a job which requires serious Office involvement it's a good thing to learn MS Office. But for writing papers, etc. buying it makes little sense. Spend a few hours every now and then in the uni computer lab and practice with MS Office instead.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:23AM (#18274136)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:But the sad thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by W2k ( 540424 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @07:34AM (#18274528) Journal
          Lots of people have responded to my post same as you, "if you have to mention Office experience to fill your CV you suck", or "if your employer thinks you need retraining to switch Office versions they're daft", etc. That's beside the point. The point is that HR people will use "office 2007" as a search term when looking through the stack of digitized CV's they got in response for their latest job offering. HR people really are that clueless. And if you don't want to lie on your CV, it will serve you to be able to put "Office 2007" in there.

          Remember that I am talking about jobs that a student, in his last couple of years or just post graduation, might consider. NOT the most technically advanced positions, more like entry-level. In those, I've found, they only care about past positions.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        If you, your employer or someone else you know is employing people so dense that they can not handle a simple transition from one application to another, it's time to rethink the hiring policy.

        Oh and you know it's funny, but I don't recall anyone wailing and gnashing their teeth because people who are already employed and using Microsoft Office 2003 will have to "learn" the new Microsoft Office 2007 user interface. Your argument seems to be that it is O.K for Microsoft Office 2007 not to look like Microso
      • The interface to Office 2007 is vastly different (and vastly more difficult - what were MS thinking?) to every other version of office.

        Openoffice is actually far more similar to the mainstream versions of office - Business won't be considering moving for 2-3 years, probably in line with vista movement (get all the retraining costs done at once). For large companies make that 5 years. The students will have graduated by then.

        If they have to have MS Office on their CV (and I agree with others that if you ha

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by W2k ( 540424 )
          Business won't be considering moving for 2-3 years

          That's a generalization. The company where I am currently employed has already moved to Vista and Office 2007. Rather painlessly too, from my point of view, though we have yet to move every last desk over.

        • Re:But the sad thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by a.ameri ( 665846 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @10:38AM (#18275924)
          Am I the only one around here who actually likes the ribbon interface?

          First of all, I am a student in Australia, and right now I am downloading Office 2007 Ultimate after shelving out $75 of my hard earned cash. This I think, is the first time I am directly paying for software in my life, and I guess it's mainly because of how impressed I have become of Office 2007's interface. I had been using a pirated copy of Enterprise Edition for the past couple of weeks, but after seeing this offer, I realised that having a legitimate copy which can easily be validated and updated is worth $75.

          I have used every version of Office since Office 97, and I have also used every version of OOo since it was Staroffice 5.x. Even after all these years, I always found myself looking for a specific option, and jumping from menu to the other menu. Let's face it, there is absolutely no logic why many of these items are where they are. It's just that we have become so accustomed with the interface that we have memorised where they are, and hence are able to use the product. Have you ever looked at a person who has never used any office product, trying to make sense out of Office? I have (my mother), and let me tell you that it is hugely frustrating, to say the least.

          Ribbons just make the whole problem disappear. The whole functionality is now right in your face, and they have designed it in a way which takes less screen real space than all those menus and toolbars did. The whole interface is now more intuitive, and everything seems in its place. Now, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy here, but realistically, ribbons are a UI improvement over menus and toolbars. It took me perhaps 2-3 days to get accustomed to it, but after that I never looked back.

          I agree that for 90% of the time, OOo is fine feature-wise, and does the job. However in the Real World (TM), people ask that you hand in your CV in "word format", and they don't even accept PDFs (don't ask me why). I am afraid I simply can't trust OOo's "save as MS Word" feature, for files which are critical to me. Not to mention that there are those of us who really need the extra functionality MS Office provides. It's not just Office's own functionality either, there are various 3rd party products that only integrate with MS Office, e.g., here in the University of Melbourne, we use a program called End Note X to manage our bibliographies and references when writing articles. Guess what word processing program it integrated with? (hint: not OOo). Now I myself probably won't trust Word (or any WYSIWYG program for that matter) for writing 100+ pages (I used LaTex for writing my Master's thesis), but LaTex is simply not an option for 99% of the population who have been brought up in a WYSIWYG world.

          To say that all those paying for MS Office are ignorants who are not aware of alternatives is stupid. Ribbon is a very fine UI evolution, and I strongly suspect that in a couple of years time, all document generating programs will use the same interface. Not withstanding the technical superiority of MS Office over all other office suits at this time, it should also be noted that many of us have to use Office to ensure document compatibility with everyone else, as well as compatibility with a large number of 3rd party products which we rely on for our day to day life.

          Now, I should probably get back to my thesis again, in LaTex...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mpe ( 36238 )
        But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice.

        It is also very different from previous versions of MS Office

        Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience.

        With the emphesis of "eventually" commercial orgainisations are very reluctant to spend money simply to make a "fashion statement".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice. Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience. In this sense, the students being allowed to buy Office 2007 for cheap is a Good Thing for them.

        I think that's a pretty tenuous justification for using Office over some other product. If these people are students then presuma

      • True with all the features and such, but my experience (granted, possibly with an early version) with OpenOffice was that it took forever to open (ok, about 5 times as long as Word) and didn't really do much other than change all the paradigms I was used to.

        Also, I just can't keep a straight face when I think about using a product called "OO.o" which looks like what Galahad said when trying to say Ni.

        I bet you could increase adoption by a couple orders of magnitude if you fixed the name (why the heck woul

    • Serious question. Can Open Office do track changes?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Octorian ( 14086 )
        This is the first feature I point to when people claim "OpenOffice can replace MS Office". Even if OO can do track changes, it doesn't do it as well as MS Office. People who want to switch in the workplace *need* damn-near-perfect file compatibility, and this is a perfect example of a place where OO can't properly handle MS Word files.

        Features like this are totally meaningless and invisible to "home users" and "vocal OO advocates", but are a day-to-day "ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE" to many workplace users.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mspohr ( 589790 )
          Yes, OO.org supports track changes nicely. I regularly exchange documents working with others using track changes and never a problem.

          OTOH, good old MS Word often has problems sharing files from one version to another (particularly backwards compatibility). I've used OO.org to straighten out these problems more than once.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cyclop ( 780354 )

          I actually use office software only at work, and in my lab we have a "NEVER EVER USE THAT DAMNED TRACK CHANGES FEATURE" unwritten (but enforced) policy. Really. It does more harm than good.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cyclop ( 780354 )

        Less-serious question: Does an office package *need* track changes?

        Serious question: I've not seen Office 2007, but until Office XP track changes were utter crap. After two passes, they become simply unusable -I don't know who invented the "balloons" visualization but that individual should be tortured. Track changes would be wonderful if (1)works between *selected versions* and not instead *tracking every single stupid change* (maybe there is an option for this, let me know) and (2)has a diff-like side-by

        • The major two reasons for the presence of the track changes feature :

          People don't use a version control system for their documents.
          The MSO format, as a binary format, is not as easy to diff as a text based format.

          You can work around these to a degree - you can script the export of text from MSO documents and do comparisons on it. You can even merge documents if you use the Save As XML features and don't mind poking around in XML documents.

          The parent comment about awful visualization should not be the case i

    • I know someone studying languages at a university, i.e. not a technical department.

      The presentations are made from a university PC with PowerPoint. Unfortunately OO's equivalent, Impress, is mostly compatible but some bugs remain with the special effects when written in PP format. Ok, maybe this person shouldn't use so many transition effects, but that is unfortunately the norm in that class.

      They have to use a translation tool which they are given a free license to. It doesn't seem much better than Omeg

    • Microsoft Office is not worth the normal retail price, but OpenOffice is just a (pretty good) imitation that isn't as convenient when dealing with documents authored in MS Office. If both were free, I see no reason other than ideology for ordinary users to choose OpenOffice.

      There's a similar offer for students in Ireland. €98 for full version of MS Office Pro 2007 is worth it.

      75 AUS$ is even more of a pittance - that's like what, €10? ;)

      P.S. WHEN WILL SLASHDOT ALLOW DIRECT INPUT OF EURO SYMBOL INT

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nwbvt ( 768631 )
      Unless of course they are one of the many students out there who has a professor that uses Office and requires its use. I'm sure that ends up being much more than 1% of the student population. Yes, you can convert an OO document to an Office document, but there are often glitches and formatting problems, which professors are often not that tolerant of.
    • I used to use Ubuntu, but then I started Uni; IE required, Word required, Excel required, Powerpoint required. No exaggerations. I had to switch back to Windows because I went to uni.

      This was a pain in the ass, but kind of understandable. What really got on my nerves was hearing moron CS lecturers' tiresome anti-MS pro-Linux routines, all while forcing you to use Windows.


      Anyway, my copy just finished downloading; having already seen the 2007 features and all that comes in Ultimate I can't imagine it

    • Re:But the sad thing is... (Score:5, Informative)

      by GreatDrok ( 684119 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @09:57AM (#18275460) Journal
      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: (Score:2)

      by Fozzyuw ( 950608 )

      Dupe or not, the sad thing is there are lots of students clueless enough to think that they need MS Office when 99% of them can do all they need with OpenOffice.org.

      Yes and part of this reason might be the fact that companies (like my own) are putting a temporary ban on Vista, Office 2007 and IE7 upgrade. IE7 being more technical than cost efficient since some of our applications won't run on IE7 (I don't know which, I have IE7 installed along with IE6 and less for web development purposes and I have no

  • ..or massively discounted.

    But you pay the full whack for the rest, sonny boy.

    Is is just me or have I seem the same tactic used to get people hooked on recreational pharmaceuticals?

    --------------
    Dirty pool, old man. Never again!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bmo ( 77928 )
      "Is is just me or have I seem the same tactic used to get people hooked on recreational pharmaceuticals?"

      It's not a coincidence that the consumers of such stuff are called "users."

      From the freakin' promo site:

      "ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS MENTION THE WORD 'OFFICE' AND THE LINK 'WWW.ITSNOTCHEATING.COM.AU' IN YOUR BLOG. WINNER IS JUDGED ON CREATIVITY OF THE STORY."

      *head asplodes* Yeah, "astroturf for us, not even for pay, please, and you _might_ get a cheap prize." The whole promo site is mentally insulting.

      --
      BMO

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tim C ( 15259 )
        A cheap prize? The offer of Office for $75AU is good to all Australian Uni students. The blog thing is essentially a free prize draw, to win a scooter, laptop, etc. I don't see that it's any different to the competitions where you mail in a card, finishing off a sentence (e.g. "Microsoft Office is great because...") in X words or less. The only difference is it's longer and public.

        Seriously, I don't really see what your problem is; sure the site sucks to my eyes, but I'm not an Aussie student, maybe it's ap

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bmo ( 77928 )
          "The blog thing is essentially a free prize draw, to win a scooter, laptop, etc. I don't see that it's any different to the competitions where you mail in a card, finishing off a sentence (e.g. "Microsoft Office is great because...") in X words or less."

          Because they encourage you to not just write an essay about how Microsoft Office is so great, but they want you to do their marketing for them. For free. If you generate a long thread that got started with the magic words, you MIGHT win a chance at a scoot

  • $1500 ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zork the Almighty ( 599344 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:05AM (#18274050) Journal
    95% off ? Does Microsoft actually sell any single license for Office to anyone at ~$1500 US ?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )
      It's Australian dollars, but even so, the short answer is almost certainly "no".

      By the time business becomes large enough to warrant the attention of the BSA, it's large enough to qualify for "volume discounts" - which are generally some absurd percentage. I'm paying about UK£120/annum for Office and I'm only buying 50 licenses. The "official" UK retail price is about UK£400 - that's if you go down the store and buy a boxed copy.

      I think the logic is "we don't expect to sell a single copy at th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by deniable ( 76198 )
      Try A$690 for Office 2007 Standard and A$850 for Professional. So it's more like 90% off.

  • That's what it should cost. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:14AM (#18274092)
    $75 sounds like a very reasonable price. That's what it should have cost in the first place!

  • Perceived value (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wall0159 ( 881759 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:18AM (#18274112)

    I guess it's all about how people think about that cost. Many people would say "$75! And every one else has to pay hundreds! It's a bargain!"

    Whereas I'd say, "it's $75 more than OO, and it doesn't even run natively on my OS - what a piece of crap!!"

  • If the ultimate edition... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dragonquest ( 1003473 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:19AM (#18274118)
    If the Ultimate Edition is being given away so cheap to students, why the hell did they ever came up with the Student Edition minus the frills? Which notably, costs more than the discounted Ultimate Edition for students.
    • Because most of the time your university has to do a special deal with microsoft to all the students to get this version.
      The company I work for has a similar deal with microsoft were we get microsoft 2007 enterprise for home use for $20US.
      Most of the time theses deals require that you have a licensed copy at work/school machines and you are only authorized to use them during the time you goto that school or work for that company.

  • Ethics (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:21AM (#18274126)
    M$FT: The same ethics as a heroine dealer at a school yard: just get them hooked young and let them suffer later!

    • Re:Ethics (Score:5, Funny)

      by Skrynesaver ( 994435 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @07:54AM (#18274580) Homepage
      The same ethics as a heroine dealer at a school yard:

      Psst wanna buy a bit of Jane Eyre, into something a bit harder, I've got Ripley here, try her and tell me what you think

    • That's not fair, drug dealers really don't hang out around schools like you see on TV.

      Software & hardware companies on the other hand....

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by argStyopa ( 232550 )
      You mean, pretty much the same strategy Apple has used for decades?

      To whit: supply systems at ridiculous discounts to schools and students, so that their life-experience with computers when they start buying their own is entirely mac-based?*

      * now with the added bonus of 'social cachet' - if you buy Apple products you "think different"! (just like EVERYONE ELSE who buys into the market-cred of being a cool, elite Mac user, not one of those tawdy, workaday galley slaves, ^H^H^H office clerks that have to slav

  • What about us? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AlphaLop ( 930759 )
    And where is the discounted version for American students?

    I had to pay full price for a copy recently for my wife as it was a requirement of the last class she needs for her first degree.... We are far from rich and the fact that we are trying to get her through college without racking up student loan debt means that this was our "Major" purchase for this half of the year ;)

    We use open office at home so it actually caused me physical pain to have to purchase another Microsoft product :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MichaelSmith ( 789609 )

      And where is the discounted version for American students?

      I have to say I am surprised. Here in AU the uni bookshops and normal software shops have always been loaded with cheap "Academic" versions of major software. You just need a student ID to buy it, even off campus.

      I always assumed it was a way for the publisher to lock people in early. I am surprised they don't do it in the states.

      • Student discount software IS available in most US campus bookstores for anyone with a valid ID.

        For Microsoft gear though, lots of (public ones at least) universities have a deal through the comp sci department where you can get MS software either free or for a song as long as you've taken a comp sci class or two. I don't recall if they were available to the general student population along with the student versions of Photoshop and so on, but if they were, it definitely wasn't as such a steep discount.
    • I think it may have ended, but when I was at college, I got full copies of Windows, Visual Studio, and Office for less than $15 each. The fees were for the CDs and shipping from Microsoft. If you didn't care about having the media, you could borrow the CDs from the library, get a product key from Microsoft's website and pay nothing.

      The retarded thing is that the school bookstore still sold the stuff at full price (actually, at a small "academic" discount price). They really didn't advertise the program at a

      • I think it may have ended, but when I was at college, I got full copies of Windows, Visual Studio, and Office for less than $15 each. The fees were for the CDs and shipping from Microsoft. If you didn't care about having the media, you could borrow the CDs from the library, get a product key from Microsoft's website and pay nothing.

        Well, at least until last year I was able to get free copies of anything. You just had to go to a website and request the license (it was emailed instantly) and then the school would burn you a copy of the cd. I got Office 2003, XP Pro, Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, Visio, Project, Frontpage, SQL Server, etc for free.

        Just as a note, I use Linux, but when I was getting a degree in programing (finished now) nearly every computer class had "Microsoft" in the title or exclusively used Microsoft products (ie,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CXI ( 46706 )
      If you paid full price it is because your university doesn't know how to properly handle software contracts. Any large group can get significant discounts from Microsoft through distributors if purchases go through a central office. We've been paying only $73 a copy at the university where I work for years. The same goes for any of a number of pieces of software. The most I pay for anything is about $150, including Adobe suites, mathematical software, CAD, etc. Heck, we pay TEN DOLLARS for Autodesk AuthCAD
  • It's a trap! For $75, you can buy enough beer to drink while you install Linux (actually if you choose Debian, the minimum total beer cost of install is merely $34.68, other distros may vary), then after that you have an equivalent computer system _and_ you'll be in a good mood for days.

  • News? (Score:2)

    by Splab ( 574204 )
    Why is this news? You can get most software cheep when you are a student, after all they want you to familiarize yourself with their product before you start on your career.

    Here at DIKU (Denmark), we got MSDNAA so I can grab everything sans office for free. And if you like me happen to be employed at the university they got campus license for employees which means office is free.

     

    • we got MSDNAA

      Whats that? The Danish equivalent of the GNAA?

      Yes, I did google and find out what it really stood for.

  • Limited installations (Score:4, Insightful)

    by om3ga ( 675900 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:50AM (#18274300) Homepage
    I thought I'd point out a few things that were mentioned on the article [slashdot.org] from a few days ago:

    - This ultimate edition thats available through this offer is limited to installation on one PC, vs installation on three PCs available to those who buy the student edition (around $249AU)
    - You don't get the CDs with the offer, but can download it, or get a disc from a participating university (I didn't check if it was just a burnt copy or a nicely labeled pressed disc). I'd pay $75 if OpenOffice came in such a fancy box!

    I was one button away from purchasing it, until I realized how unnecessary it is for me. I use OpenOffice for my university studies, it opens every word document and PowerPoint presentation thats given to us from the Lecturers. I'm not sure how it is for other things. But for those of you who think this is a good deal, please consider, or atleast try OpenOffice [openoffice.org] first!

  • Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition (Score:5, Funny)

    by BillGatesLoveChild ( 1046184 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @07:01AM (#18274370) Journal
    If it is "Ultimate" does that mean there will be no further releases?
    • I think it's more along the lines of 'Final' as in Final Fantasy.
    • Well, if the battles going poorly, there will also be MS Office Mega Edition.

      And if perchance none of those install successfully, there's also the Armor-Digivolved Edition.

  • Discounted software (Score:3, Interesting)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @07:06AM (#18274400)
    Funny how often the US gets to bear the brunt of development costs while the rest of the world gets deep discounts. It's not just software but drugs as well. Even Canada gets radically cheaper drug prices than the US. Part of it is government policies but the bulk is corporate america bleeding the US dry then discounting the rest of the world. Interesting that some drugs can be sold for a few dollars a dose at a profit overseas and yet sell for tens of dollars here. Microsoft can count on the US to pay for the development costs so the rest of the world is gravy. Europe doesn't see the software discounts generally but a lot of the world does. I'm sure Microsoft is claiming hundreds of millions to perhaps billions in developing Vista but we pay for that development in higher software prices. In this case we aren't getting much for our money. The added security seems to come with a high anoyance factor and the eye candie we can live without. Direct X10 sounds impressive but do we really need a whole new OS to run it? There are some definate improvements in memory limits and such but we pay for it in radically greater system requirements. The low end computer manufactures are likely going to be stuck with Linux since the system requirements are so high. Ironically that will come back to bite Microsoft because more and more entry level users will become in exposed to Linux. They may be trying to avoid that with the foreign markets because people are going to be less inclined to pay both the high OS and hardware costs. Give the students cheap OSs then hopefully they stay branded to Microsoft.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by EvanED ( 569694 )
      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Trelane ( 16124 )

        For free, legally.
        It's not free. It comes out of your taxes, tuition, and campus privilege fees.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by xtracto ( 837672 )
      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

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by adolf ( 21054 )
        Hello. I read your comment.

        Twice.

        I still don't get your point.

        Are you trying to add to the conversation in some fashion?

        If so, please clarify.

        Thanks!

    • This is a short term special, not the permanent price.

      Rest assured, the rest of the world pays through the nose for US-developed software and hardware. You're absolutely not subsidising us.
    • you get exactly the price you want. New Zealand pays back part of the medicine cost to their patients. For each type of medicine, they put out a bid and only the manufacturor with the lowest price gets his medicine subsidised by the government. They have about the lowest medicine prices on the planet. Pharma companies, just like anybody else, steal what they can get away with.
  • Microsoft is lowering the price because Open Office is a much better fit for the college student budget? Or maybe that Google Apps stuff... No.. couldn't be that at all...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CXI ( 46706 )
      Actually, no. Office has always been available at these prices to universities who know a thing or two about negotiations and contracts.
  • That'd be better by far.

  • First one's always free (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Grail ( 18233 ) on Thursday March 08, 2007 @07:57AM (#18274594) Journal
    And then when the discount "Office Ultimate" software decides to lock you out of your Office documents, you have to pay the full price plus the unlocking fee.

    Read the EULA. Understand about DRM, and Microsoft's plans for the future. ORCON is fine and dandy until you realise that the provider of the control mechanisms is the real owner of the document.

    This FUD brought to you by the number 51 and a Tin Foil Hat.
  • The sleezy guy with a scooter, pocketpc phone, and a vista laptop. I am so glad I just graduated from college.
  • Might list Australian states rather than "Non-US" and the US states. What with the requirement of the offer being "for Australian uni student only" and all...

  • Are they automatically pirates if they carry on using it... because technically they will be... Will the Office GA check their student status periodically to determine if they're still eligible... because it should...

    Yet another example of Microsoft pushing things on students to get them hooked...

    There's an awful lot of student packages out there in the UK for instance that aren't technically legal anymore as the person or family is no longer eligible.

    I'd love to see Microsoft get serious on checking contin
  • We got all microsoft development products and OS's for free at my university. (yes it was a sanctioned and legal program)
  • At the University of Minnesota, students have been able to buy copies of Windows XP and Office 2003 for $4 each...for several years. Starting in a few weeks, this is going to be changed to Vista and Office 2007. How is this new?
  • Certainly, two stories about cheap student pricing for Microsoft products will help M$ quite a bit... even with the humour assigned to the first story. Microsoft _really_ _really_ _really_ wants students to buy their products, and then use them for the rest of their lives.

    What better place to advertise than on slashdot?

    Alternatively, perhaps we've seen some monkeying with the new story posting moderation system? How many M$ employees does it take to get news stories in place?

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