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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

I think Microsoft is attempting to target students more aggressively, perhaps because of the appearance of other cheap/free options on the market in recent years. Just last year Office 2007 was on sale to students at $60.

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My university in Germany offers all students all somewhat current versions of Windows for free (including Windows 7 Professional), you can download it as often as you want and generate a ton of keys. It would actually be more useful for me if they offered Office but they don’t. You can get Office for less than 100€, though.

Any student with a cooperating higher-education centre can get loads of free Microsoft software (of notability, VS 2010, Expression Studio 4) through DreamSpark[1] as well as getting Office for a huge discount[2] (at least in the UK).

[1] https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx [2] http://store.digitalriver.com/store?Action=DisplayStudentHer...

Also anyone can register as student member in IEEE for $19 and get access to e-academy MSDN.

The university my wife attends (in the USA) has some kind of weird site license where students get it for free from the IT department if they are willing to drop off their laptop with the university. (This isn't a bad deal, since probably the average freshman also buys their laptop from the university anyway). They can pay $10 to get the DVD themselves. (This is a very large state supported school.)

My school (even larger and state supported) charges like $92 for the same thing.

I've not figured out why two almost identical schools about 20 miles apart have such a different pricing scheme for their students.

I do know that in our relationship, my wife buys all the software. :)

The difference in pricing is likely due to the schools participating in different programs. Feel free to reach out to me if you're interested in seeing your school have a similar program as the one your wife attends. I would be happy to put you in touch with someone who'll know more about that topic than I do.

I attended two state Universities in Texas, and both had cheap licenses like you describe. I don't think it's so weird.

They just hand them out here. And Windows Vista Ultimate.

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