Is Microsoft Begging Students to Buy/Use Office
Interesting. When I was in at college, I spent about $135 as I recall for WordPerfect. The software came on 5 1/4″ floppy disks. I was glad to have it compared to the typewriter, a bottle of whiteout, and lots of wasted paper.
Now Microsoft is is begging students to pay just $59.95. That’s a $620 discount off the retail price of $680 or a 91% savings. That throws out the standard pricing models the rest of the software industry use to calculate value. And what’s included in this “Ultimate Package:”
* Word
* Excel
* PowerPoint
* Oulook (with Business Contact Manager)
* Accounting Express
* Publisher
* Access
* Infopath
* Groove
* OneNote
Is this another sign that the monopolistic power in Redmond is nervous about Google’s and others web-based apps that allow today’s students to collaborate and work on any computer at any location on or off campus — or even on mobile devices like the iPhone? Maybe so.
Comments
One Response to “Is Microsoft Begging Students to Buy/Use Office”
Additionally, I’m sure MS is nervous about the whole ODF versus OOXML standards game. Sure, applications supporting ODF are far behind in adoption when compared to MS Office, but MS has to play “King of Bunker’s Hill” now that companies like IBM are donating significant resources to OpenOffice.org.
Google Docs exports in OpenOffice format. I’d like to think that MS is scared that users of the world will at some point recognize they CAN make a choice, and MS wants to dictate what the world will choose. Wishful thinking…