While there are several reasons that people refrain from purchasing software, one of the biggest is the price. Some just aren’t willing to spend money for expensive software like Windows or Office.
It’s been known that students are able to get decent discounts on software which makes the prices much more affordable. When you think of student discounts, typically you think of college students.
Did you know that there are actually stores that offer discounts to parents of students who are in any grade from kindergarten on through college? One site even offers it to faculty and janitorial staff of these schools. Some of them require no proof of “student” or “parent of student” status, while others ask for documentation like a student ID, a report card, pay stub if you’re a teacher, letter of enrollment, etc.
One of the sites that offers the discount to students, and parents of students is Academic Superstore. They require that you prove your eligibility, but after you do that, they keep it on file for 12 months so that you can make multiple purchases throughout the year. There they offer Vista Ultimate for $399 versus the regular price of $499, and Home Premium for $239 from $299.
At the same site, they sell Office Professional 2007 for $169.95 (retails at $499), and the Home and Student version for $139.95. The Office Professional offer is a huge discount. If you look around, they have a lot of great deals on other software like Adobe Photoshop CS2 which retails for $599, and they sell for $289.
Other stores that offer student or student/parent discounts worth checking out include:
- CCV Software
- Campus Tech
- VioSoftware (doesn’t require proof)
Source: WindowsSecrets.com
Software is the biggest rip-off when you compare it to other media like Music CDs, Movie DVDs, Video Games, etc. Besides, there’s so much great freeware out there, you don’t even need to pay for anything anymore. You should do an article on the best freeware out there, maybe? Like, Picasa for photo library, Comodo for firewall, etc.
Yeah, sure, the OS and Office are hard to get around paying for (OpenOffice is still quite fine to use though) but other than OS and Office, why would people ever need to pay for stuff?
Go on, get crackin’ on a list and spread the word on freeware
I figured all the freeware fans would chime in here
Hmmm….sounds like something I should make a forum topic on so that I can get everyone’s opinion on the best freeware. Then I can make a listing and give some brief descriptions of what it does. Good idea Slasher!
That’s a better discount than nothing, I suppose, but when my cousin was attending Indiana University, she got Office XP for $10. (That wasn’t a typo.) Not some crippled student version either.
That is pretty good…one of my friends is going to work for Microsoft and he said that they get the software for 10% of the retail cost. That means Vista Ultimate which normally costs $400 will run him $40. He said that they also cap how much you can spend on an annual basis, but he couldn’t remember exactly how much it was but he thought it was around $1000 per year that they can spend on software.
$10 for Office XP is even better than what the Microsoft employees get.
I dig [CampusTech.com] for discount prices on student and academic software.