Microsoft Discriminates against UK users?

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2007 7:06 pm

Hey Bill, how come a teacher or student in the USA can buy Office Pro 2007 for between $160 to $200 (depending where you shop) but for a teacher or student in the UK we have to pay out three times that amount (taking currency exchange into account)?

Whilst I am not defaming you or your profiteering company specifically, I find this a little hard to swallow bud, so you'll not be too upset if I don't send you a Christmas card this year.

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2007 10:27 pm

Not sure, but are their hefty import levies???? It seems that the UK likes to tax on everything and anything right? Wink

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 3:56 am

I see you were actually reading my blog rather than skimming Wink

Yes the UK likes to tax you on everything, and to add insult to inury, if they can, they'll tax you on your tax!
You make a very valid point and I'm sure there are some import duty levies or something but I would 'guess' that it wouldn't be enough to justify a 300% price increase so I will research that and get back to you.

Interstingly, I cannot buy it in Poland at all!
Apparently it is illegal to export to Eastern Europe - according to Bill.
I have seen Office installed on machines here in Poland and there is Polish language support so I am now asking myself WHY is the support for a language that is use in Eastern Europe if it is illegal to export a product to that country.

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 4:15 am

You can buy the Student Teacher version of Office for around £100. You just don't get Access and Publisher with it.

...but I have to agree we do tend to get ripped off in the UK.

Regular Joined: Apr 09, 2004 Posts: 87 Location: UK

Yeap, we do get ripped off here for most things, worse being houses.

The company I work for installs Ofice 2007 on our work PCs or Laptops and I must say I really like it. I wouldn't be able to afford the full version for sure.

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 8:47 am

Hey, BTW, I am not defending Mr. Bill. I am merely defending a free market, of which, I believe very strongly in.

BTW, I don't use any Microsoft products at home anymore (with the exception of the O/S). I have found just as good or better tools now and most of them are free.

I use OpenOffice now (free - but I donated) and I can even open and save these into their Microsoft equivalents. As long as you do not do too wild of formatting and heavy graphics, they seem to port back-and-forth just fine. Something to consider...

Regular Joined: Mar 14, 2005 Posts: 91

You guys should really try out Ubuntu.
I tried it out about 2 years ago and have been microsoft free ever since.
There are good alternatives to just about every windows program you can think of, including OpenOffice.
It is worth giving it a try, you can try it out without installing it by using their live CD, although it won't run as fast as it would if you installed it to the hard drive.

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 7:44 pm

I had contemplated using it and still might at some point. Have you ever tried to use it in a dual boot fashion?

Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 9:39 am

Yeah, dual boot was how I started out using Ubuntu. I had two hard drives and one I was just pretty much using for music/videos so I wiped that one out and put ubuntu on it. On boot, I could just from windows or ubuntu from a menu and after a few weeks, I noticed I wasn't booting into windows at all anymore. It will work pretty much the same even if you just partition a single drive(the ubuntu installer can do this for you, but defragment in windows first). I've never lost any data while messing with ubuntu, but if you have important files you'll of course want to make backups to be safe.
Another cool thing is that I was able to copy my thunderbird profile to ubuntu and keep all my old mail. I would say the best part is no more virus scans, disk defragmenting, adware scans, I never have to shut my computer off, and I don't have to reboot every time I install or upgrade a program. But don't get me wrong, there is a learning curve but its not too bad and in the long run you just come out of it knowing more about Linux.

Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 2:27 pm

I may give Ubuntu a go even though I do see security issues quite frequently for it but I guess if they patch stuff quick enough it's ok.

I would really miss my Dreamweaver and Photoshop CS3 though.
I may give the 'on CD' thing a go and see what happens.

Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 3:32 pm

I run photoshop CS3 in a windows virtual machine using VMware and it does pretty well, but it is best to have a bunch of memory to do this. I usually give windows 1GB of memory and leave the other 1GB for ubuntu. I'm guessing that dreamweaver would run just fine in the VM too.
For some image editing tasks you can fire up GIMP(a free image editor) but I admit it doesn't really come close to the features of photoshop. For dreamweaver there are a bunch of alternatives depending on what you are really looking for in an editor.
The live cd really won't give you a good idea of how fast it runs but you can check out the basic features.

Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 7:35 pm

I just recently helped a vistor from Brazil purchase the Microsoft student package for word, excel, etc. They had puchased a laptop here in the States, and the trial version was in English. When it came time to purchase it took them to the site to purchase the English version for $149, but when I went to get the Portugese version the price went up 2.5 times.

Involved Joined: Apr 05, 2006 Posts: 263

i have a friend in Ohio , get one of yours here Gaurdian buy it and post it over to you Smile

he also mentioned ubuntu which i may install tbh on my second drive and give linux a try , he swears by linux . i look forward to a day without virus or adware scans.

i know this is an old post but hey im a windows user Razz