Thread: Overpriced microsoft software?

Bloody hell. What is up with Microsoft and overpriced software? I mean, fine... price your operating system at $250 if you want... But what is up with the price of Microsoft office???

To buy office ultimate straight from Microsoft costs almost $700. From a separate retailer it is more like $900.

Standard is $400 from Microsoft.

Like... really... What the hell? Instead of buying both vista and office I could go and get a new computer. I could put on linux or even XP (which is way cheaper) then get open office. How the hell does this business model float? People are so retarded when it comes to computers.

I think it works because Office's biggest buyers are things like universities or businesses or whatever. As far as I know, it isn't originally meant for individual consumers.

A few years ago, I purchased the 2003 version of Office for like $175 at a student discount. Discount my ass.

I got a copy for free after attending a Microsoft seminar.

Actually, I snagged two.

Vendor lock-in, is the term you're looking for.

I've got an old copy of Office 2000, and don't plan on ever updating it. Why do people care so much about which version of Word they're running? It's the same shitty UI, with shinier buttons

I noticed their products are overpriced also, such as a xbox 360 controller can be up to 50-60 dollers and the battery charger (why is this not included) is about 90.

Originally Posted by Volcon

I noticed their products are overpriced also, such as a xbox 360 controller can be up to 50-60 dollers

Uh... yeah. A wii-mote with nunchuk (almost mandatory) is 60 dollars together. Where have you been?

I feel a rant coming.

Because people don't shop around, they believe that Windows is the only OS out there for them so that's what they get. Real computer nerds know that $250 is far too much for an operating system, plus the $90 downgrade that you have to buy if you want XP.

Office is meant for businesses that have lots of money to burn. Microsoft believes that their crippled version Microsoft Works (oxymoron) is good enough for the average student, I guess they fail to realize that professors want .doc format, which works can't do.

What Replicon is correct. For Office and Vista I see no upgrades in the underlying system, it's just a revamped UI. Windows Vista is still Windows underneath, it still does aggressive page swapping, it still has a registry at it's core, it still can't figure out how to defrag on the fly, or optimize itself after upgrades. Office 07 is still the same internal spelling and grammar checker, dll and resourcing hogging bloatware project the brags about that fact that Microsoft gets requests all the time for features that Office already has. They say that it shows how feature rich the software is, while logical people know that it shows how overcomplicated it is that people can't find those features.

Few people know what Linux or Mac OSX or OpenOffice.org or iWork '08 is. Linux and OOo are completely free and have most of the functionality of their equivalents and OSX and iWork has more functionality and costs half as much.

It's not just Microsoft though, what the hell is with Photoshop costing $700? If I hadn't gotten it for free I would have been perfectly happy with The Gimp.