Why is there there no - Office Home Edition

Hi

I was just browsing my local PC world this weekend and thought I'd see howe much it would cost to buy Office 2003 for my home computer. To my amazement it was between £100 and £200 just for Word, and teh whole package was an amazngly huge price I have been permantly emotionally scarred by. This is exactly the reason home computers in the UK have an old "dodgy compy" of office on there machines. I'm fairly certain that most consumers wouldnt mind paying £100 for a light version of office that just contained the basic features.

So why havent MS cashed in on this obvious gap in the market. Oh and dont mention works, as since it has a different name it just confuses consumers.

Andy

Good question. While I've gotten a copy as beta reward, I know several people who want it (the standard Word, Excel and Outlook package), but don't want to pay the several hundred Euros the package costs. If MS would put feature reduced versions on the market, I doubt these people would notice it.

They just use Word to type some simple letters incl. simple text formattings. Excel just for some simple spreadsheets and diagrams and Outlook for one or two mail accounts and the calendar.

You could axe Sharepoint functionality, VBA, Exchange ability and few other things usable in businesses, and churn this out to the market as home edition.

Office could also be a lot more modular - only pay for the features you use.

Well you can get the student and teacher edition pretty cheaply. This can be installed on 3 computers aswell so should do most houses. But if you have no students in your house your pretty much screwed

You can pick up the teacher and student editions here in the USA at your local computer shop. I suspet you may be able to do the same over seas. Do not qoute me on that though

You can also buy a *legal pre-installation copy on eBay for 10% of the shop price..

*Pre-Install / OEM copies must come with a piece of hardware to resell.. most come with an IDE cable.

You paid £1200 ?! It is £400~ on Amazon!

I just bought it off surfspot.nl, a site that sells software that you can only access if you're a student or employee at one of the participating educational facility, such as Leiden University.

I payed a grand total of €18.75 for Office 2003 Professional NL. 100% legal.

No, more like 12 pounds. You were probably confused by the comma decimal separator, which is standard in the Netherlands. I changed it to a period for clarity.

I'll do that in the future. As I said, here in the Netherlands we use comma for decimal separator and a period for thousand separator, so instead of 5,351.12 we'd write 5.351,12

In any case, it's pretty much free yes. Of course, that is because Leiden University pays a yearly fee for the Microsoft Schoolcontract to Surf-Diensten. I have no clue what that costs though.

A similar organisations also exist for primary education, it's called APS IT-diensten. My father works at a primary school and he uses that. Not only can you get cheap home copies for students and employees, but also a normative license, which means you can install it as much you want on all computers inside your facility. The only limit for the Microsoft contract is that for Windows desktop oS's they only sell upgrade licenses, so you already need an original license for each PC.

The only stupid thing is that the standard Microsoft School Contract does not include MSDN Academic Alliance. And since my faculty doesn't have a separate MSDNAA contract, it means I can't get Visual Studio this way.

You REALLY should add an edit tag.. (He had a comma instead of a dot, looked like €18,75)


So it was 'free'. I mean because £12 would only REALLY cover P&P and a few pound to Microsoft.

What about Microsoft Works?  I don't know what it would run in Europe, but stateside, you can get Works 8 directly from MS for $50, which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, email, and powerpoint viewer.  Supposed to be Word and Excel compatible.  I have no idea what the specific feature differences are.