Microsoft has the best marketing engineers in the business

If you really are a student or instructor, there are sites that sell the software much cheaper. Check out

You need to provide them with proof, in the form of a school ID card and check stub (I am not sure what students need).

Ben Miller

Outlook is pants anyway. Use Thunderbird, it costs nothing.

Office 2007 has a lot of cool features in excel and access.

Things one will not find in the open/free 'office suite' products.

" Damn, those Microsft Marketing Engineers are the smartest."

That's a joke. Instead, their customers are the dumbest.

There is an alternative Open Office set of progs that are FREE and that have been available for years. Visit

I hope that wakes you up :-)

I didn't mention open office, although I use it on some of my computers. I agree with others that it is not 100%, but I find it usable. I do have Microsoft Office on several of my computers. The site I referenced sells Microsoft products, and many other types of software, at a huge disount to educators and students.

Ben Miller

I have tried Open Office and the product is not as good as Microsoft's.

Thanks for the link. I am looking to buy MS Professional Visual Studio 2008 NET in the near future. I run a distant learning site and do not know if that will qualify me, probabaaly not, but it is worth a try.

To the real M$ retard -

Take a look at the following -

Tried to migrate my Windows XP MS Office Outlook email to Vista

I happen to think Microsoft is the greatest. I rememeber when Apple had the GUI market and they priced themselves at about 3 to 4 times any one else. Gates and his partner were smart and very successful marketeers. While hobbiest were bum fundling around he bought the CPM operating system for 50 grand and modified it then leased it to IBM for the 16 bit computer that replaced the 8 bit one's in a period of about 6 months. He rewrote the 1963 free version of OBASIC and called it MBasic and got IBM to put it in a chip on the motherboard. His GUI imitated Apple's but was differenct enough to pass the copyright suit. MS now employes thousands of people and run a first class shop in Redmond where they serve free beer and wine along with Pizza in the break rooms according to what I am told. MS's Visual Basic Net is absolutely the fastest GUI development environment on the market and is now free. Of course it insures the tenure of the Windows operating system by requiring that the NET interpreter be installed and it can only be installed in Windows so far, but is still well worth the time to use. As far as the Europeans and their open source software is concerned I have yet to buy any software from Europe that runs worth a damn and that includes Intellilock licensing software that is an absolute flute.

I looked at your links and I am sooo scared. Dumbass, why do your think they make anit-virus software?

But you must remember that the Guis we are now so familiar with actually owe their origins to Xerox who came up with the original idea. However, only Acorn in the UK stuck to the original Xerox spec with a three button mouse and context sensitive menus which could appear anywhere on the screen the mouse pointer was at.

Acorn went straight from 8 to 32 bit using ARM chips (they were founders of ARM) and it was often speculated that BG had an Acorn on his desk because many of the features of Risc OS, Acorn's OS, where introduced in W95. MS are still playing "catch-up".

What Acorn did lack, unfortunately, was the marketing hype but it was boardroom shennanigans and and huge dept owed to them by Oracle that saw the breakup of the company. UK/US politics also muddied the waters.