How much does Microsoft's Office XP professional cost? Well strangely enough it all depends on where you live. No one will be surprised that we UK citizens will have to pay more than anyone else but you may be surprised to find that Microsoft make us pay over two and a half times the American price. Go to an American web site and you will see this Microsoft word processor and office tools software advertised for £182 ($277), a quick look at all the UK suppliers sites will inform you that the UK price is £519.
Microsoft are not the only company who insist that us British should pay over double for their products. The popular e-mail software Eudora from another American company Qualcomm also charge well over the odds, in fact they charge exactly three times the price to their UK customers. What is even more galling is this software is almost always sold and downloaded over the Internet. It doesn't make any difference to Qualcomm if I log onto their web site from down town America or Timbuktu. The price for downloading Eudora is between £19 ($29) and £26 ($39) depending which Internet site you choose. That of course does not apply to us UK citizens, for us the price goes up three times to £57.
I recently tried to buy Eudora over the Internet having seen it advertised at £19 ($29). I filled in all the information required and even entered my credit card number and hit the "Purchase" button. To my astonishment the transaction was declined because I was from the UK. I was diverted to another web page where the price now became £57 and I was asked to continue from here. Obviously I didn't go ahead but I was left with an overwhelming feeling that this company was trying to stitch me up. I wouldn't buy Eudora e-mail software now if it was the last e-mail program on earth. Of course it isn't the only e-mail software and there is a great choice out there for customers. I ended up buying an e-mail program called "The Bat", this is also an American product but this company are quite happy to sell their product to UK customers for the same price as any other customer.
The message here is that not all companies are taking the UK for a ride but you need to check their pricing policy to ensure that you are not paying too much. And it's not just a little over the odds, in the case of Microsoft's Office XP Pro its two and a half times over and in the case of Eudora its an incredible three times the American price.
Would sir like the £500 version, the £50 version or the free one?
While we are talking about buying office software here's an interesting point. As I have already said Microsoft's Office XP Pro costs £519. Have a look in PC world and you will find that on the shelf next to Office XP is a product called Star Office priced at £70. This is Sun Microsystems version of the same thing, word processing, spreadsheet etc. So why would anyone pay seven and half times the cost for a Microsoft version? That's the power of marketing. Well marketing plus the fact that most people don't realise that they have a choice.
If you download Star Office from Sun's web site (www.Star.com) the price comes down to £50 but you will need a fast Internet connection because the download file is 50 megabytes.
On the subject of choice there is an even cheaper office software suite available, in fact this one is free. It's the open source version of Star Office called Open Office. This too can be downloaded over the Internet from www.OpenOffice.org. This is a really great bit of software; it does almost everything the more expensive packages do. Of course you can buy Microsoft Office XP Pro which will enable you to do wonderful things like share your spreadsheets over the web with your friends but really, how many of us want to do that.
We live in very strange times, Microsoft has become very strict with their licensing, (some would say understandably). Even after paying £519 for the Office software you can only use the package 50 times before you must you register it with Microsoft. For companies who need to provide several copies of Office software to their staff this is becoming very expensive. This point is not lost on some very switched on organisations that are now moving over to Star Office. The well known transport lawyers Ford and Warren have been using Star Office for years. They go one step further and also refuse to pay Microsoft's price for an operating system preferring to use Linux, but that's another story.
