Martin Gordon's Blog

Microsoft will begin running a promotion later today aptly named "The Ultimate Steal" in which it will offer Office 2007 Ultimate for $59, less than 10% of the $679 list price. The catch is that you have to be a student (or at least have a .edu email address).

This is an excellent move by Microsoft. Students with fast university internet connections and limited income are more likely to pirate expensive software, something software vendors try to curtail by offering student discounts for their software (with the added benefit of potentially gaining life-long customers). This promotion takes that strategy to an extreme. At $59, the "too expensive" excuse flies out the window. For non-freshmen (as this was the first back-to-school season where Office 2007 was available), this is a good motivator to upgrade from Office 2003 and will most likely drive Office 2007 adoption through the roof.

Office 2007 is one of Microsoft's flagship products and perhaps the best product they've ever shipped. I've written about the new ribbon UI back when the product was in beta, and though I'm using Office 2003 at work, every time I come back to Office 2007, I realize how big the differences between the two are and how less stressful it is to use the newer version. While deciding to "upgrade" to Vista is a difficult choice to make (the quotes around "upgrade" should be quite telling), upgrading to Office 2007 is a no-brainer and I highly recommend doing so to anyone, especially at this price.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Office 2007, The Ultimate Steal, promotion, students, software

Hey everyone, long time no post. I've been really busy this past week. During the day I'm at work as an equity systems intern at DuPont Capital Management and at night I was busy moving out of the West End and into the fraternity house, where I'll be for a week until our new lease starts on the 1st. And finally, I bought a 17" iMac Core Duo so I've been busy playing around with that as well. Suffice to say that those three haven't left me much time for posting.

Now that I'm done moving furniture and boxes and my iMac is set up for the most part (waiting on a gig of RAM), I'm back. I don't know if I'll be able to post as frequently as I did last summer because I don't think I'll have much time to surf around scouring for post ideas and news.

Work so far has been alright. I have to be there at 8, so I'm out of here by 7:30. I thought it was going to be terrible waking up so early, but once I adjusted my sleep schedule, it was alright. I prefer working 8-5 rather than 9-6 because I can stretch the morning out to 5 hours and then the afternoon slump doesn't have much time to kick in. I've been mostly programming Excel/VBA macros to format data and now I'm starting to work on another macro that will automatically create charts from data pulled from FactSet, a financial data/research application.

The iMac has been spectacular so far. I was choosing between the iMac and both MacBooks to replace/supplment my aging Aluminum 1.25GHz PowerBook. I decided on the iMac, at least for the time being, because I'm not too sure I'll need portability over the summer. Once school starts I'll re-evaluate and possibly sell the iMac and get a Merom MacBook Pro. The MacBook was out because of the lack of dedicated graphics and the premium of $500+ for the MacBook Pro with specs similar to the iMac (not to mention the heat and whine issues) disqualified the MacBook Pro as well. Even with just 512MB of RAM, everything seems to be faster than my PowerBook with 1.5GB RAM. The iSight and FrontRow are welcome additions and while I don't think I'll use them every day, having them there when I do need them is a plus.

I'm thinking that a 30GB BootCamp partition (for gaming) and an 8GB Parallels VM (for apps I might want to run but don't want to restart for) will be good as a Windows solution. As per my last post, I've downloaded Office 2007 as part of the public beta program. I haven't had much use for it yet (and running it inside Parallels with only 128MB RAM dedicated to it was painful) so I haven't had a chance to take it for an in-depth test drive. The little I have used of it, however, I've been really impressed with. As someone who has spent a lot of time using previous versions of Office, I've gotten pretty used to the old-style toolbar and don't have much trouble finding the right button to push to do what I want. After using the Ribbon, I don't know how I'll ever be able to go back. Microsoft definitely got it right with this. Live previews are excellent and the larger buttons are much easier to hit as well. Bravo, Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: DuPont, internships, college, iMac, Core Duo, Mac, Intel, Excel, VBA, Microsoft, FactSet, finance, capital management, BootCamp, Parallels, Office 2007, Ribbon

Hello. I am writing from Office 2007 Beta 2 inside Parallels Workstation.

EDIT: It didn't get the time right. It posted the time as 11/29/99 19:00 :(

Technorati Tags: Office 2007, Microsoft, XML-RPC, Wordpress, blogging, Office 2007 Beta 2, Word 2007, Parallels, virtualization