Paying $75 for something worth $1000 is a good deal. Paying $75 for something worth $0 is a terrible deal. Paying $1000 for something worth $0 is utter stupidity.

So I’ll pay $0.

Discounting their software licenses for Education markets is a deliberate move in order to secure future streams of income.

The point is to get the young audience of users hooked on MS products as soon as possible. As they grow older, everybody knows its harder to adapt to new things and break old habits. (essentially, you want to exploit this known human behaviour to your advantage.)

I dubbed this the: “Get them while they’re young” program. (Just talk to admins at Universities. MS discounts their licenses to the point of virtually giving it away, if they find out alternative solutions are being considered.)

It doesn’t just apply to Office suites here in Australia. It also applies in Europe, where they severely discounted their development tools for university students as a direct response to the low adoption rate of their solutions. (many have adopted open source solutions instead).

Considering MS recently announced they’re “supporting ODF”, I don’t see why I need to bother paying for MS Office. OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, IBM’s Lotus Symphony, etc does me fine.

They’re:

* Multi-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc)

* No anti-piracy measures implement (Things like “activation” or “genuine advantage” nonsense).

* Free ($0)

and

* Legal (no pirating!)

If you want to take advantage of all the features MS Office Ultimate offers, it beats OO hands down, every time.

For $75 you can’t go wrong.