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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 - and the original story was much funnier - it covered MS's promotional site being flagged as a phishing site by MS's own IE7.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Yeah, I missed one. Ultimate is A$1175. And for extra sticker shock Vista Ultimate is A$750.