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People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work

Microsoft makes using Office at home ridiculously affordable for those using it at work.

This is just one example:

The Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) is available to Volume Licensing customers with active Software Assurance benefits. Eligible employees may purchase qualifying Office software for use at home through an assigned Program Code provided by their organization.

Home Use Program

The Power of Office in Your Home Only $9.95

No one in FOSS has come close to integrating a credible alternative to Outlook into a "free" office suite.

The stand-alone desktop office suite is a product for the nineties. Both Google and Microsoft see the future as tightly integrated office systems with components built for the client, the server, and the web, and mobile is not an after-thought or also-ran.

People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work

Microsoft makes using Office at home ridiculously affordable for those using it at work.

This is just one example:

The Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) is available to Volume Licensing customers with active Software Assurance benefits. Eligible employees may purchase qualifying Office software for use at home through an assigned Program Code provided by their organization.

Home Use Program

The Power of Office in Your Home Only $9.95

No one in FOSS has come close to integrating a credible alternative to Outlook into a "free" office suite.

The stand-alone desktop office suite is a product for the nineties. Both Google and Microsoft see the future as tightly integrated office systems with components built for the client, the server, and the web, and mobile is not an after-thought or also-ran.

Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.

I'd be hard put to name ten credible alternatives to the core components of the MS Office suite.

MS Office remains the gold standard for clerical work.

Full time staff. Part-time job. Office temp. Senior Volunteer. It doesn't matter. If you have MS Office skills, you are employable anywhere south of the Artic circle.

If your employer supports Microsoft's Home Use Program, Office Professional Plus 2013 is yours to download for $9.95. Take Office home for just $9.95. Software Assurance Home Use Program

My copy was ten dollars for 2013. My 2010 copy cost me ten dollars. Both were the "Professional" versions. Both copies were purchased through Microsoft's home use program. From what I understand if you have a work email from a company that has a Software Assurance agreement with Microsoft you're eligible. You can even just enter your email in to see if you are eligible. If it had been anything more, I wouldn't have been interested.

http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/home.aspx?culture=en-US&page=lookup

At one time many home users had free or inexpensive access to MS Office through enterprise licensing. I recall install such a free copy on my mothers machine years back. If such free licensing were still available, I could see home users accessing MS Office.

The Microsoft Home Use Program is still very much alive.

HUP has a global reach and is multilingual.

The current bundle is Office Professional Plus 2013, which includes Lync.

Regional pricing varies a little, up and down. If you happen to be one of the sixty or so people living in the Pitcarin Islands, the cost is $15, plus S&H on the media. if required.

Ars Technica had this to say about Office 365 Home Premium:

Microsoft has done a lot to sweeten the pot to attract consumers into the subscription model, enlisting nearly everything but the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. While the lowest-cost perpetual-license version of Office 2013---Office 2013 Home and Student---is priced at just under $140 and includes the four core applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote), Office 365 Home Premium Edition comes with all of those applications plus the Outlook mail and calendar client, Access database, and Publisher desktop publishing tool.
Home Premium also comes with licenses for five installs of the suite---including Office 2011 for Mac installs for those households with mixed operating system allegiances. Home and Student has been trimmed down to allowing just one installation per license. And as part of its subscription, customers will also get 60 minutes a month of Skype calls to phone numbers within the US (as Microsoft continues to position Skype as the consumer version of its Lync enterprise voice, video, and messaging service). And it comes with an additional 20 gigabytes of SkyDrive cloud storage.
While you can install Office on five systems at once through Home Premium, where those five licenses are is fungible. You can manage which computers are actively using their Office user licenses from the account webpage, and you can shut off one to make room for another when necessary. That means your licenses can travel with you from computer to computer, and---at least theoretically, if you keep all your data in SkyDrive or a networked drive---you can be up and running with a new PC in a manner of minutes.

Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Phrases like "home user" mislead the geek, I think.

"Software for the professional working at home and abroad" would be closer to the truth for a product like Office. Everyone in the family may be using the program --- in part because they share the same interests and ambitions.

But for him, it is one of the fundamental tools of his trade.

they really need to be worried about giving up the home users because $99 for Student is just too high.

MS Office Home and Student for Windows and OSX consistently tops the software bestseller lists at Amazon.com, Walmart.com, etc., etc., etc. The price of the Home edition has never been an obstacle to sales.

OneNote is one of the overlooked gems in recent versions of Microsoft Office. OneNote makes it simple to take notes and keep track of everything with integrated search, and offers more features than its popular competitor Evernote. One way it is better is its high quality optical character recognition (OCR) engine. One of Evernote's most popular features is that you can search for anything, including text in an image, and you can easily find it. OneNote takes this further, and instantly OCRs any text in images you add. Then, you can use this text easily and copy it from the image.

OCR anything with OneNote 2007 and 2010

Most buy the three-seat version of Office Home, retail boxed.

Office University Edition is $99 at Walmart,com (Word. Excel. Publisher. OneNote. Outlook. Publisher. Access.) Student ID required.

If you use Office at work the chances are quite good that MS Office Pro can be yours for $9.95. Microsoft Home Use Program

MS Office Home will ship with every WinRT tablet.

The truth is that the real cost of an office suite is in consumables. Ink, toner and paper.

Free software saves you next to nothing.

To add to your post...

http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/home.aspx?culture=en-US

If you look, you need a work e-mail from a participating employer, and a code from them. Now, i'm willing to bet the company of ~50 employees i work for is unlikely to be on that list, considering the last time we did office upgrades, we bought retail boxes of office for all 4 of us in my office. Also the cost of office is nothing compared to the cost of the CAD software I use daily, and no one thinks anything of shelling out for Inventor, and AutoCAD every year and to be honest, office, and autocad are seen as costs to making me productive, much like a hard hats, ear plugs, and ice water for construction workers.

As individual users move towards OO, small businesses move towards OO. As OO gets more common, more people feel like OO is an acceptable option. You see where I'm going with this.

Nowhere fast.

If your employer is part of Microsoft's Home Use Program then your personal copy of MS Office Professional is a $9.95 download for Windows or the Mac.

[U.S. - The price will be about the same, localized for just anywhere eles in the world. DVD media is available]

Microsoft Office Professional Academic is $80 direct from Microsoft with student ID.

There are better deals to be had through your school.

MS Office Home & Student - for Windows & the Mac - remain comfortably in the top five or top ten software bestsellers at Amazon.com. It's unlikely you'll find a PC game other than Scrabble or Oregon Trail in the top one hundred.

Retail sales of MS Office are the tail the wags the dog.

Getting Started with Open Office .org 3: OpenOffice.org 3.0 by the OO.org team is #67,694 in books at Amazon.com.

Amazon.com stocks 742 books on Microsoft Office 2010 products alone.

49 books on OpenOffice.org, all versions, all topics.

MS Office targets the office manager and the clerical worker.

The features that work for them are what sell the product - and it sells very, very, well even at retail.

In the top 25 software bestsellers at Amazon.com, versions of MS Office rank 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, and 17.

No. 1 is the 3 seat version of Office Home 2010. No. 3 is the 3 seat Win 7 Upgrade Family Pack.

No. 27 iWork '09. No. 41 iWork '09 Family pack.

Bestsellers In Software

That is really quite an achievement when you look at the free "Office Web" apps and the many discounts available for Office home and student use: Take Office Home! for only $9.95

---- and it is a practical, real-world, validation of the Ribbon UI, whether the geek is willing to admit it or not.

But the geek spends far too much time praising the virtues of OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice as a stand-alone office suite. Where Microsoft excels - if you will excuse the pun - is in the development of integrated office solutions that scale to an enterprise of any size.

It's getting harder and harder for Steve Ballmer to point to his resume and be able to justify his work over the past decade. While Microsoft has pushed out upgrades to all its software, the big picture is gloomy enough to make him sweat at upcoming board meetings

You want the big picture:

MEASURED by profits, Microsoft trounces Apple and Google. In the most recent three months, Microsoft earned $4.52 billion, versus Apple's $3.25 billion and Google's $1.8 billion. Lost from view is what arguably is Microsoft's very best story -- its transformation into a powerhouse supplier of the specialized software that meets the complex needs of large corporations, what the trade calls selling to "the enterprise."

Microsoft's enterprise software business alone is approaching the size of Oracle. But despite that astounding growth, Microsoft must accept that, fair or not, victories on the enterprise side draw about as much attention as being the No. 1 wholesale seller of plumbing supplies. Microsoft won't receive the adoring attention that its chief rival draws with products like the iPad.

"Tech investors pay for growth," says Sarah Friar, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, who believes that those investors do not appreciate the durability of Microsoft's cash cows, Windows and Office. She has many positive things to say about Microsoft's ability to innovate, pointing in particular to the robust sales of server and database software, which are now almost equal in size to Windows revenue.

BRENDAN BARNICLE, a software analyst at Pacific Crest Securities...praised its enterprise software business, formally labeled "Server and Tools," as "an incredible business," accounting, he said, for about 24 percent of the company's revenue and with an operating margin of 40 percent. Even With All Its Profits, Microsoft Has a Popularity Problem

Twelve of the Top 100 Software Bestsellers at Amazon.com are editions of MS Office 2010 or the Win 7 OS retail boxed. MS Office Home & Student for the PC and the Mac are currently - and typically - #1 and #3.

There is not a single PC or console video game in the top 100 list.

These numbers are astonishing.

MS Office Professional 2010 is $10 if your employer participates in Microsoft's Home Use Program. $80 with student ID. Office Professional Academic 2010

Most people simply never needed $400 desktop productivity apps.

Almost no one pays retail list for the boxed set of MS Office.

The "Ultimate Steal" at $60 for those with student ID. MS Office for $10 if your employer participates in Microsoft's Home Use program.

Those of us that don't really need Word, nor really even like it, should not be held hostage by those that do.

The office manager has work that needs to go out by the close of the business day. He is employing fifty to one hundred and fifty temps he needs to be productive at every empty desk he has to fill.

That makes MS Office skills marketable at any age and at any job site south of the Arctic Circle.

Classes and certification programs no farther away than your local high school, community college, senior center, or public library.

"We want to legalise non-commercial file sharing " Then how do I sell software to home users if they can copy it freely?

A couple of ways just off the top of my head (there must be far more). Sell support & updates; no one said you have to support the product if it wasn't bought from you. Incentiveise people, for example give away posters or concept art with your game, or perhaps a chance to win a prize with your app. Lastly but most importantly sell at a reasonable price, I believe people would rather buy software from a reliable source than trust that a .torrent isn't full of malware. They can only do this, however, if your product is affordable. An example, a lot of people pirate MSOffice. I have a legitimate copy of the Enterprise version. It cost me a total of ~£18.00and that's only because I paid extra for the backup disk & shipping without those it was ~£9.00. How you ask, through Microsoft's home User program http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/chooser.aspx?culture=en-GB . I know it's cool on /. to bash MS, but this is one thing they've go right.

Out of interest, what is it you're developing? I have no pirated software on my PC, it's almost all FOSS and freeware. I don't think I've paid over £20.00 for an application, and most people are willing to pay up to that to avoid dodgy .torrents or malware infested warez sites.

I don't think I've used any new features for a word processor since WordPerfect 5.1. That had just about everything I needed. For 99.9999% of the population, OpenOffice is more than enough.

Microsoft doesn't sell a word processor.

It sells integrated - off-the-shelf - solutions for office work that scale to an enterprise of any size.

It sells a global labor force that lives and breathes MS Office.

That is why if you have a corporate e-mail address Enterprise Office for home use can be yours for $10. Microsoft Home Use Program

Yeah, I tried to convince her to switch to OO, but according to her, it's incompatible with her employer (big publisher) and she must use MS Office.

If she has a corporate e-mail address chances are good her employer participates in Microsoft's Home Use Program.

Microsoft® Office Enterprise 2007 is hers for ten bucks. Microsoft Home Use Program