Microsoft undercuts planned Office 2010 retail price Activating a pre-installed copy of Office 2010 on a new PC will save you almost a third off the price of buying an off-the-shelf copy of the planned suite. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced pricing for a set of planned key cards, announced in October, that will be between 20 per cent and 30 per cent cheaper than the company's …
My gf bought a laptop with Office preinstalled, but if you wanted to have thye install media, the online purchase option was much more expensive.
We bought the box/shelf version on sale for the same price.. then just activated the preinstalled one with the key from the box ;)
It was priced around $50 or $60....
"industry is still stuck with office 2k3. some places have upped to 2k7. and open office is free.
"
Well, all well and good if you need basic Word and Excel support. As soon as you include a corportate Exchange infrastrucutre, you at least need copies of Outlook. Again, basic e-mail and calendaring can be done with freeware, even with an Exchange server, but try working with rules, distro lists, SharePoint integration, collaboration on documents, or more, and Outlook starts becoming your only option. Trust me, we're a VERY anti-microsoft shop, and held on to alternate e-mail systems as long as we could. Someone finally figured out that by doing so we were loosing over $5M per year in efficincy losses due to poor document collaboration and meeting management, plaus a lack of realtime remote communication efficincy for key salespeople and executives. Out entire Exchange deployment, including 3 years support, for 15,000 people, cost barely over $1M.
Oh, and then there's what DOESN'T come in open office. Visio. InfoPath. OneNote. These are indespensible in our IT areas where we have over 2,200 IT employees. (we're a data processing shop with over 3,000 servers and several hundred programmers, not your typical IT distribution for a company out size).
Open Office is great for home users and Mom n Pop small shops, and in some business areas, but in large firms, Office is really the only considdered option beyond simple document creation. No, out 15,000 users don;t all need a registered copy of office, many could get by with Open Office, but then again, those employees could also get by with just PDFs as they don;t really create anything ever that could not go in notepad.
Given that this is in Channel Register, it would have been interesting to hear if any of Microsoft's "channel partners" (ie organ donors) would have been willing to raise their heads above the parapet and say "Dear Bill, we don't like this, it cuts into our sales volumes, our revenues, and our profits. Please desist or we will er er er er er <click>".
It would also have been interesting to hear something about what kind of a sweetheart deal the likes of Dell and HP are getting for pre-loading Office ready for this (and whether activation gets them a further per-system kickback), though that kind of info is often called "commercially sensitive".
Psst! There's this thing called "OpenOffice" that works on more platforms than MS Office, is suitable for 99% of the people who currently use MS Office, allows you to actually interoperate with others (as opposed to trying to force others to use MS Office) and best of all is available as a free download.
Let the remaining 1% who need all the MS Office lock-in stuff spend their money, and do yourself a favour.
Really.
... is what I'm telling my clients, and all of them so far agree that OpenOffice does everything they need.
It's suitible for 99% of home and small business users, maybe.
I have 2200 people here for whom Excel and Word alone are NOT good enough. They need Visio, Project, InfoPath, OneNote, and native SharePoint integration for collaboration. Also, just try to get on in a business world without Exchange and Outlook for a while (we did for 10 years). it costs MORE (Groupswise, TAO, they're all more expensive and have less integration, and there are no other DOD STIG approved large coprporation email systems.)
We looked into Open Office. We tried HARD to stay off Exchange. We realized not switching to MS Office and Exchange was COSTING nearly $4 million a year.
Once you have to buy Outlook and Visio, the rest of office under open licensing is free... We also tried alternatives (including homegrown stuff) for project management, and honestly, nothing does it as well as Microsoft Project, and noone we could hire into project management knew anything other than that package, which was a training barrier.
Then there's the training. Most people walk in the door with some Word and Excel experience. Few if any have Open Office experience, which means training them. I'm not talking about "open document, start typing" I'm talking about document collaboration and team development functions that are very difficult to implement in other apps, or simply are not options. Then there's digitally signing docs to think about as well...
Sorry, I'm a certainly NOT a fan of M$, and as an analyst our credo is "if it runs on linux it goes on linux" (same for virutalizing), but when it comes to workstations, especiually managaing 15,000 of them, M$ is really the CHEAPEST and EASIEST option. yes, there's a cost up front, but have you ever tried to manage a network of over 1,000 Linux machines? I have. It sucks. Honestly, if they'd just release Visio and Access for OS X we'd probably dump XP for OS X instead of moving to Win 7, but alas, it;s never been available even though the rest of office it.
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