Computer Programmes, Are they really worth it?

[Dai.]

Hello Guys!

Today Microsoft released office 2010 and I've looked at the prices for it and it's pretty expensive for people to buy.

Do you guys think that computer programmes are overcharged?

I'm not a cheapskate and I don't mind paying for it if it's worth it but the prices for Microsoft office go up to £200+ for the whole package or they are £119 each. That just doesn't work out!

Microsoft aren't the worst though, Adobe have recently released their CS5 Suite for over £1,000!

 

[Mojo]

If you are a student you can get deals much cheaper, similarly there are often discounts if buying software with hardware at the same time. ISTR Microsoft being unhappy about OEM software being given away with a £1.99 mouse off a certain website...

http://www.microsoft.com/student/office/en-gb/default.aspx for Office

 

[devon_metro]

If you are a student you can get deals much cheaper, similarly there are often discounts if buying software with hardware at the same time. ISTR Microsoft being unhappy about OEM software being given away with a £1.99 mouse off a certain website...

http://www.microsoft.com/student/office/en-gb/default.aspx for Office

£50! Bargain, almost half tempted to get that as Office 2000 is a little bit outdated. (even if it is free)

 

[oldrailman]

I run Vista Home Premium on my PC and it works fine, but then Windows 7 appeared and I thought about an upgrade - as you do. Just seen the price for the complete package - over £100. Don't think I'll bother for a while.

 

[GB]

You would think that they would get more sales and cut piracy levels if they sold thier products at a more reasonable level.

I personly would never pay what some of these companies are charging!

 

[Geezertronic]

I get all mine for free so I'm ok (Jack) - and it's all legit as well. Mind you I just upgraded to Office 2007 on my works laptop and wished I hadn't, it was slow before but now it's a cuppa tea inbetween emails

 

[466.networkers]

Microsoft Office isn't worth however many hundreds of £s that they want for the latest and (not so) greatest version - OpenOffice by Sun (the people bought out by Oracle who invented Java) is completely free and perfectly capable to deal with most things including Redmond's new and oh so bloody annoying .abcx formats! (Where abc equals .doc, .xls, .mdb, etc).

 

[Dai.]

You would think that they would get more sales and cut piracy levels if they sold thier products at a more reasonable level.

I personly would never pay what some of these companies are charging!

Exactly my thinking, if they drop the price, more sales = more money, you'd only need to drop the price slightly to see a change, say about £100 to £60?

You'd have to double your sales, but if more people bought it at the lower price - there would definitely be an improvement. It will be much more crucial now as well with free software coming in

Microsoft Office = Google Docs, Open Office
Adobe Fireworks/Photoshop = GIMP GNU.

I run Vista Home Premium on my PC and it works fine, but then Windows 7 appeared and I thought about an upgrade - as you do. Just seen the price for the complete package - over £100. Don't think I'll bother for a while.

Yeah and it's not really worth paying over £100 for it in my opinion.

If you are a student you can get deals much cheaper, similarly there are often discounts if buying software with hardware at the same time. ISTR Microsoft being unhappy about OEM software being given away with a £1.99 mouse off a certain website...

http://www.microsoft.com/student/office/en-gb/default.aspx for Office

There are cheaper better deals around if you do a Google search.

 

[rail-britain]

For a business, £200 is nothing

 

[Dai.]

For a business, £200 is nothing

Depends how well the business is doing and £200 is a base price for the Home & Business item, it goes up to £500 which can usually be a majority of a daily intake for a business, a small retail business for example will only take £200-500 in a day

 

[devon_metro]

Depends how well the business is doing and £200 is a base price for the Home & Business item, it goes up to £500 which can usually be a majority of a daily intake for a business, a small retail business for example will only take £200-500 in a day

£200 takings a day? Thats pretty rubbish, can't be making much profit... if any.

 

[90019]

£200 takings a day? Thats pretty rubbish, can't be making much profit... if any.

I think he probably means profit rather than gross income, which, for a small business isn't bad.

 

[Geezertronic]

For a business, £200 is nothing

The big businesses do not pay £200 per license though, they use Volume Licence Agreements which work out a lot cheaper (same applies to Windows Desktop & Server OS licences).

They also get add-on licenses (for products such as Access, Visio etc...) cheaper as part of the VLM. The VLMs are still restricted though and Microsoft could ask for a license audit at any time but unless a big company is obviously extracting the urine, this is not so common

 

[Royston Vasey]

I'm not sure about the original post, the development work that goes into a product such as MS Office 2007 is enormous, there will be hundreds if not thousands of people working to develop and test the product, and provide up to date support.

I wonder whether the amount of effort put into developing, for example, the iPhone 4G is comparable. Sure, the manufacturing cost is much lower for the Office CD, but developers have to recoup their development costs. Software, in that sense, can be like a novel pharmaceutical - very cheap to make, but expensive to develop.

The iPhone will retail for hundreds of pounds, yet we are upset about paying anywhere near that for software.

Perhaps the reason for this perception is that MS Office is so ubiquitous now, and installed on a huge number of work PCs, we expect it to be as cheap as the water we drink.

 

[90019]

The iPhone will retail for hundreds of pounds, yet we are upset about paying anywhere near that for software.

You're comparing apples and pears though. The iPhone you're paying for the hardware and the brand associated with it, the software is almost incidental to that.
I think people would be upset if they had to pay hundreds on top of the price of the iPhone for the software for it.

 

[Ivo]

The newer versions of Office - not just 2010, 2007 as well - are not the hassle or money. It worked very well with 2003, and was decisively cheaper too. Then they lump on loads of "new" and/or "exciting" programs that are actually nigh on useless to the average end-user (although Picture Manager is very useful for a certain POTW competition). Why did they feel the need to make all these changes? As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Thus far, I have had copies of 2000 before now, on most (if not all) machines I and/or my family have had I/we have had 2003, and now on my laptop I have 2007 as well (still prefer 2003 though; I will use that nine times out of ten). And yet, I kinda didn't pay for either 2000 or 2003... and 2007 came with my Disabled Students' Allowance. For a cost of £0.00, 2007 is good value. Stick a "1" in front, and it's marginal; a "2", and it's a rip-off.

 

[Tom B]

I can't remember the last time I bought any software - 2007, perhaps? I don't use office programs on a regular basis - only to type occasional letters to the bank etc. I don't understand why people insist on using Office for long documents like dissertations - LaTeX is ten times better and more suited for them. Office just makes a meal of it.

Microsoft do give away software to CS students, though, presumably in an attempt to convince them to use their products after they graduate.

 

[dan_atki]

LaTeX is ten times better and more suited for them. Office just makes a meal of it.

Couldn't agree more. After dabbling with MikTeX in order to complete a piece of project work, I found it to be much easier to use than Word after I got used to how it worked. Most things are intuitive and maths just looks much better in it. I could probably churn out a whole assignment in LaTeX far quicker than I would be able to in Word now.

I even managed to convince some friends that it was much better and they should try it. They resentfully did and have not looked back since! Granted, it takes some getting used to (and those who use it for the purpose of typesetting maths will often use the learn-by-finding-the-required-symbol-in-the-141-page-pdf approach), but after that you really can see how powerful it is.

 

[devon_metro]

Microsoft Office isn't worth however many hundreds of £s that they want for the latest and (not so) greatest version - OpenOffice by Sun (the people bought out by Oracle who invented Java) is completely free and perfectly capable to deal with most things including Redmond's new and oh so bloody annoying .abcx formats! (Where abc equals .doc, .xls, .mdb, etc).

I don't personally rate Open Office, the only reason I have it on my system is to allow me to convert .docs to .pdf format if required.

 

[thefab444]

Indeed, there's a few things that annoy me about OpenOffice as well, but the export to PDF feature is nice seeing as it wasn't available in MS Office 2003 and I don't want to shell out for the more recent versions of MS Office as they annoy me even more than OpenOffice!

Writer is fine, but Calc can be very annoying, with lots of minor gripes e.g. if you delete columns then all the cells become twice the size they were for no apparent reason, as well as more major bugs e.g. the fabled 'Recovery Loop' (if you open a document it immediately crashes Calc and you have to then "Recover" it).

Calc also keeps pestering me to download a new French dictionary. :?

 

[Z12XE]

I don't personally rate Open Office, the only reason I have it on my system is to allow me to convert .docs to .pdf format if required.

If you have another word processor (such as word) just install doPDF and it will handle things like that just great - and work with any prog which allows you to print.

 

[Geezertronic]

If you have another word processor (such as word) just install doPDF and it will handle things like that just great - and work with any prog which allows you to print.

I use CutePDF on my works laptop, I use another product on my home laptop (can't remember the name) but it's useless in comparison as the PDF documents are usually quite big with that one.

CutePDF does me fine

 

[pinkpanther]

You would think that they would get more sales and cut piracy levels if they sold thier products at a more reasonable level.

I personly would never pay what some of these companies are charging!

I'm in the software industry and believe me pricing has effectively zero effect on piracy. * In fact, in many sectors (including the one I work in) dropping software prices doesn't raise sales at all.

* Unless you make the software free and try to make a living selling support. Unfortunately that's even harder than selling the software the old fashioned way.

The thing to remember about suites like Office is that they are priced for businesses rather than home users. The fact that so many home users want to use them (and the resultant availability of editions such as "Home and Student") in preference to the alternatives is a reflection of their success in that market.

Hence, you could always try OpenOffice or something like Ability instead if the pricing is too high for you to justify.

 

[Geezertronic]

* Unless you make the software free and try to make a living selling support. Unfortunately that's even harder than selling the software the old fashioned way.

That's how PCWorld make their money selling computers. They sell them for next to no profit then make their money selling the support that you don't really need

 

[pinkpanther]

That's how PCWorld make their money selling computers. They sell them for next to no profit then make their money selling the support that you don't really need

That's the rub. It really depends on the market you're running in.

The biggest company operating under that model is RedHat, and as they're operating in the enterprise market (where corporations want the reassurance paid support offers) it works for them. Even so, by their own admission their turnover is a fraction of the size it would be if they operated using a more traditional model.

By constrast in the market my company works in (software development tools) that just doesn't work as our customers tend to be self supporting. We'd be broke in weeks if we tried it.

Anna-Jayne Metcalfe