Proposed Office 2007 Home & Student Package

[Stephen the RevUK]

Dear Microsoft, I've just been looking at your proposed packages for the new
2007 Office suite, and I am stunned that you aren't including Outlook in the
Home & Student package! I bought my two teenage student daughters the 2003
Office Student & Teacher package to install on our home network, and to
enable them to get into computing, and they use Outlook for all their email
needs. However, if it is only available as a separate program, or as part of
a package costing $200 more, as appears to be the case in your new package
policy, then neither they nor I will be able to afford to upgrade to the new
Office 2007. They have recently been tempted by friends using cheaper, or
free/open-source, email programs, but I have persuaded them to stay with
Outlook because of the excellent student pricing available. I don't think
that they will consider it worthwhile staying with Microsoft Office, if your
Home & Student package omits Outlook. I would suggest that some serious
thinking needs to be given to this matter if you want to avoid a significant
drop-off in your student take-up of Office 2007.

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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...-6841c70abfdc&dg=microsoft.public.office.misc

 

[Barry Watzman]

While I do agree and so voted, I also understand MS' reasons for doing
it ... to prevent people from using the "Students & Teachers" (soon to
be called "Home & Student") version of Office in a corporate
environment, since it is priced hundreds of dollars less than Office
Standard, but is currently the same software.

There is another alternative for MS to consider: They could create a
version of "Outlook Home" that was the same as Outlook, but that did not
support Exchange Server E-Mail as a client, however it would still
support "Internet E-Mail", e.g. POP3 and SMTP, and also IMAP E-Mail.

By the way, Office 2007 is going to have a drastically different user
interface, and many users may not want to upgrade from the 2003 version.
I think that MS will see more resistance to migration than they have
seen in more than a decade.