There are now reports of a 40% price drop in Office 2007 Home & Student edition for customers in Pakistan.
There are now reports of a 40% price drop in Office 2007 Home & Student edition for customers in Pakistan.
This is part of a global effort by Microsoft to reduce the price of Office in what it calls ’emerging markets’. The price drop is promoted only for the Home & Student edition which has Word 2007, Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007 and OneNote 2007 (but not Outlook) and comes with licenses to install on three computers.
A legally purchased copy of Office does give you access to infection free source disks and knowledge that you’ll be able to install future Service Packs with no license hassles. According to Microsoft 84% of software sold in Pakistan is pirated and 25% of that in infected with viruses and spyware.
The rest of the Microsoft announcement was similar to those made in other regions like Africa and China. No exact prices are given just the broad ‘40% off’ comment, nor is there any mention of pricing for any other Office 2007 bundle.
Microsoft is usually reluctant to talk about the pricing of Office however we do know that the Home & Student bundle is intended to sell for ‘less than US$100’ on the street in what Microsoft defines as emerging markets (which is most countries except the lucky few outside the EU that are defined as ‘High Income’ by the World Bank).
The Pakistan announcement is simply applying that global policy in a single country. If you live in a non-EU, non High Income country then you should check the price of Office 2007 before buying (and assuming you can afford it).
Even with a 40% price drop, Office 2007 is still well out of reach for most Pakistani’s. When the gross average income is less than US$215 a month (using the same figures that Microsoft does), not many people can afford the luxury of spending half that on software.
