Office Ultimate 2007: Just $60! (for students)
Starting in 59 minutes, 35 seconds, Microsoft will begin offering Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for students for the amazing price of just sixty dollars. This special offer for students only represents a $620 discount off the retail price of $680, a 91% savings.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's $60 student price for Office Ultimate 2007 lands in the same week the company is squeezing piracy and shoring up desktop demand: on September 11 it confirmed a worldwide 'black screen of darkness' measure against pirated Vista copies, and an upcoming report pegs U.S. retail boxed-copy sales of Windows Vista at 59.7 percent below early Windows XP numbers. The story traveled fast enough that CNET ran it under a headline calling the deal a 'steal,' alongside Microsoft's own promotion page.
The discount is striking because Ultimate is Office's top retail tier at $680 — meaning Microsoft is willing to give up roughly 91 percent of list price for this segment. It also sits two days after Microsoft confirmed plans to deliver software over the Internet as part of a cloud computing initiative, framing a week in which distribution and pricing strategy are visibly in motion together.
First-order effects
- College students gain legitimate access to the full $680 Ultimate edition — Access, Groove and all — for $60, removing the main financial incentive to run a bootleg copy on campus machines.
- For Microsoft, the offer converts the top-tier SKU into a near-loss-leader for one segment while protecting the $680 price point everyone else still sees.
Second-order effects
- The move pairs with the Vista anti-piracy crackdown as a carrot-and-stick package: enforcement narrows the pirate route at the exact moment a cheap legal alternative appears, which is the combination most likely to shift student behavior rather than either lever alone.
- With retail boxed Windows sales running far below XP's pace, segment-specific discounting gives Microsoft a second demand lever that doesn't require cutting the sticker price every customer sees — a pattern competitors selling productivity software into the same campus market now have to answer.
Third-order effects
- If deep student pricing holds as a standing template, Office pricing structurally splits by who you are rather than what the box costs, and the campus-licensed cohort graduates into the installed base carrying Microsoft file formats with them.
- Combined with the confirmed cloud-delivery initiative announced September 3, per-segment pricing points toward a world where the marginal cost of distributing another copy approaches zero and the real fight is over whose formats own the documents.
The trend: Desktop software pricing is fragmenting from one box price into per-segment offers — students first — as Microsoft pairs cheap legitimate copies with piracy enforcement and prepares Internet-based delivery.