Microsoft Offers Students 3 Months Of Office 365 Free

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I don't know, less than $20 a year for everything you get doesn't sound too awful bad. What do you guys think?

Geared for college students and teachers, a license for Office 365 University costs $79.99 for four years and is good for up to two PCs or Macs. The educational suite includes the same applications and features found in Office 365 Home Premium, including the 20GB of SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes worth of Skype calls per month.
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My MS documents usually open fine in Open/Libre, but documents from other people - coworkers, professors, etc - tend to be pretty horribly formatted to begin with and Open/Libre usually makes a mess of them. People really need to learn to use styles and they need to quit using old pirated copies of Office.
 
Using Libre Office, there is no time limit, and I don't need to rely on my internet connection to use it.

They're doing this to try to get people hooked.
 
So if you buy this and you have skydrive at the 27GB because you were grandfathered in, does this 20GB add to that? Anyone with experience?

Also I like a lot of what they are doing but the inability to locally sync group or shared files is completely lame, especially considering it worked fine in MS mesh.
 
Software as a service or as a subscription isn't stupid its pretty smart and it will be better for us all in the end. Imagine no more asking if people have the latest version of software all the time, just do they have a subscription. Versions of products has always been a form of expiration of product it was just a long way around it created by the reality of software distribution at the time and the lack of open mindedness about how things work.

So my point is like it or not you were buying softare with an expiration all the time anyway you just were told it was something else. Every couple generations they would just change the format of the documents etc to force the old laggers to upgrade. So essentially people who keep up were over paying to compensate for the social cheaters who would lag behind. Or you were all essentially paying 2x the price because you skipped every other release.

The main problem I have is I don't fully understand how this will work out, for instance if you buy office 365 which you can install on 5 computers can those people have different logins and live accounts or does it all have to sit in one live account? Will people make family live accounts? For a bit here we are going to have growing pain issues like this. But I have confidence that the competition between MS and Google will push these issues along.

Same thing with video games, I personally think it would be really cool if games like say COD were just subscriptions and all the players would create one huge community, because one of the worst things about games now is how the community gets split up every time a new game releases.

The only problem is that companies often try to charge too much for the subscription
 
This is a crap deal as students used to get offered lifetime 2010 for $20 instead of a year demo.
 
^ Ya but this gives you all the upgrades too.

I did this as I am currently in college and I have a Mac with bootcamp installed. This way I get Office 2013 on my Windows partition, office 2011 on my MAC partition and some extra goodies to boot for the next four years. Doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
 
Borgschulze said:
I use OpenOffice... It's free forever...
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This.

I'm converting everyone I know to OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Once they see that it's pretty much identical and offers the same features they thank me and never look back.
 
I'm trying Linux and I really want to install it on my Laptop. For that, I need an Office replacement.

Ubuntu comes with LibreOffice, and it's fine. BUT... some documents I have to use Arial, and I can't find it anywhere, and don't know how to install. Is it hard?
 
rudy said:
Software as a service or as a subscription isn't stupid its pretty smart and it will be better for us all in the end. Imagine no more asking if people have the latest version of software all the time, just do they have a subscription. Versions of products has always been a form of expiration of product it was just a long way around it created by the reality of software distribution at the time and the lack of open mindedness about how things work.

So my point is like it or not you were buying softare with an expiration all the time anyway you just were told it was something else. Every couple generations they would just change the format of the documents etc to force the old laggers to upgrade. So essentially people who keep up were over paying to compensate for the social cheaters who would lag behind. Or you were all essentially paying 2x the price because you skipped every other release.

The main problem I have is I don't fully understand how this will work out, for instance if you buy office 365 which you can install on 5 computers can those people have different logins and live accounts or does it all have to sit in one live account? Will people make family live accounts? For a bit here we are going to have growing pain issues like this. But I have confidence that the competition between MS and Google will push these issues along.

Same thing with video games, I personally think it would be really cool if games like say COD were just subscriptions and all the players would create one huge community, because one of the worst things about games now is how the community gets split up every time a new game releases.

The only problem is that companies often try to charge too much for the subscription
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I work for a local school district here in El Paso, and unfortunately we still have some Win98 boxes (in departments that don't "need" newer machines like hourly employee lounges) with old versions of office. I think it is a bad idea to connect these to our network, but I don't get paid to make those decisions. However, if we bought new machines today, we wouldn't be paying double. We did spend much less over the long haul. I don't get the paying double statement.

I think the new pricing for MS Office is ok, especially if you have several machines. It seems less of a deal when compared to the former "University" editions. I don't know. I have Office 2007 H&S, and probably will not upgrade unless I need something like Access. I, along with most I think, could get by with their Office Web Apps thing, or and older version of Office, or one of the open source suites for everything we really need. This would probably apply even after an Office 365 sub ran out. As long as you have the documents stored locally, it shouldn't be an issue.
 
The former university versions were $70 - 80, the whole point is that the business model has to move in and take over before you can feel the full effect and competition.

A lot of people in the game industry cried and whined about DRM and digital distribution, saying they would use it to screw us over. But guess what really happened? Super cheap games on steam, gamers gate, etc..
 
rudy said:
The former university versions were $70 - 80, the whole point is that the business model has to move in and take over before you can feel the full effect and competition.

A lot of people in the game industry cried and whined about DRM and digital distribution, saying they would use it to screw us over. But guess what really happened? Super cheap games on steam, gamers gate, etc..
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Ummm depends on your institution.

My NCAA div 1 school sold/sells full Office suite products to students for $10-15USD...used to be open licensed (technically supposed to be destroyed upon graduation), then went to the "Professional Plus" licensing that self-destructs when Microsoft learns you're no long a student.
 
Yes but your institution probably subsidizes that and it is not relevant to discussion. I know people who get it for free through their institution but that's not really useful information to the rest of the people and it would not make it valid for me to say why are you idiots downloading libre for free when you can get office for free. Anyone with an .edu address can get it for 70-80 and that's the number we should be focusing on.
 
Lorien said:
This.

I'm converting everyone I know to OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Once they see that it's pretty much identical and offers the same features they thank me and never look back.
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OO/LO has not 'been the same' as Microsoft Office since the ribbon interface in 2007. To date thats six years of forward thinking development, while the open source projects have the same look, same internals, have ugly front ends and are slow to perform even basic actions. I will take the product that actually has an active development team thank you, not the 'omg bloatware, lets make all our software look like the 90s' jack team.
 
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