My family has a bunch of computers. But more than three, so a single 3key pack won’t cut it. It’ll be more than that, so why aren’t there better deals? I don’t know.

Variation & Prices

According to the comparison page, there are three different choices of Office: Home and Student, Home and Business and Professional.

1. Home and Student comes with the core applications, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It also comes OneNote which is a silly name for taking many notes. Why note called it, Notes? Anyway, the price is $149.99 for a CD and three licences keys.
2. Home and Business comes with the core package, OneNote plus a lovely copy of Outlook. All for the great price of $279.99.
3. Finally, Professional comes with the core package, OneNote, Outlook and also Publisher and Access. Honestly, I have no idea what the Publisher is for and Access fails in comparison to what a real database can do. Perhaps you get Visio and InfoPath included with this, but I can’t be sure by looking at the comparison page. The price is a whopping $499.99.

Did I mention that you can single license packs though? I can’t finding any specific pricing on the Microsoft website, but this is taken from NewEgg.

1. Home and Student – 1 key for $109.99.
2. Home and Business – 1 key for $169.99.
3. Professional – 1 key for $309.99.

So many choices.

Doing the Math

Let’s start doing the math with the CD/3key versions. They’re more expensive but per key they’re cheaper.

Let’s see how much each package costs when divided by the number of keys it gets:

1. HS – $49.99
2. HB – $93.33
3. Pro – $166.66

These prices are reasonable when buying the packs by the number of keys. It’s a good deal when one considers that a single key otherwise is $309.99 for a single key versus a $166.66 key. Seriously, someone missed that.

Now, let’s look at the software in each package:

1. HS – 4 applications – $37.49
2. HB – 5 applications – $55.99
3. Pro – 7 applications – $71.42

These prices aren’t the whole story though. Because if you bought HS, for example, HB wouldn’t seriously cost you another $56 to buy it, technically. So, the upgrade prices (in terms of what was include in each tier):

1. HS – base price – $37.49
2. HB – 5 applications – $55.99 – $37.49 = $18.50
3. Pro – 7 applications – $71.42 – $55.99 = 15.43

These price differences reflect how much more you are paying per included application. For example, when you get the extra Outlook application in HB, you’re paying an additional 18.50 for it, per application. Kind of silly, isn’t it?

Now, let’s combine the two – price per license per application:

1. HS – $12.49
2. HB – $18.66
3. Pro – $23.80

This shows that, in other words, a single copy of Word should cost $12.49. The average price of all the applications is in fact $18.26, which would be great if real.

Finally

Nothing here was conducted scientifically. All I did was divide some numbers by some other numbers. I question though, the absurd prices for software like this. Everyone knows that Office volume is huge, either at the hands of manufactures including or buy retail buyers. Perhaps more people would buy, if it weren’t some ridiculous amount to buy.

That said, I love Office and I love beta testing Office.

The Windows 7 Sidebar in the past has been more or less static. In Windows XP, you were given the option to jump to predefined places within the operating system file space. This was useful in some situations but didn’t work well when you wanted to jump from My Computer view to a Desktop folder. Vista offered some help with the new always present address bar. You could use the triangle handles to navigate quickly to disparate folders or places. You still couldn’t absolutely set the sidebar.

Windows 7 Explorer Sidebar

In Windows 7, the Windows Explorer Sidebar is now customizable. You can easily drag items into the Favorites section. The sidebar also contains always present links to the My Computer and its sub-drives, the network and any visible computers and also the new libraries. This makes the sidebar incredibly useful now.

I love to, for instance, drop my blogging material folder in my sidebar so I have quick access to it at all times. So it saves me time. It would be nice to be able to rearrange the sections, but I’m not holding it against anyone; I can easily imagine people messing that up.

OSX Finder Sidebar

You can compare this to the Finder’s sidebar is OSX. It functions in a similar, collapsible sections and arrangeable items within those sections. Places takes the role of favorites though in the new sidebar. So at least you’ll feel at home when using Windows 7 if you’re an OSX user.

Have a good week!

The overhauled task bar in Windows 7 is definitely an eye-catcher. One of the new features is collapsing previews. This allows the task bar to house the icons of applications and let the user hover over the icon to see the sub-group of windows.

Task Bar Previews

So why is this a great thing? You can see more applications on the task bar at once now; no more double stacked task bars. There are some cons though. For instance, in XP and Vista, you could easily glance at what you have open by simply reading the title. Now you have to hover over the icon with your mouse in order to get the same information.

Task Bar Preview is a handy little tool. While it certainly doesn’t take the spotlight in the new line up of Windows 7 features, it surely adds something to the mix that makes Windows 7 feel new and fresh; fit for a new generation.

Have a good week!

Mozilla's Ten Grand Is Buried There

Well, the competition has started now and the clues are streaming out of Twitter. Check those out so you can win ten grand and support the best browser ever so you can donate your ten grand to a open source browser.

Either Mozilla or a supporter put up an excellent site, Ten Grand Is Buried There. This is pretty neat, there’s a Firefox crop circle somewhere and the map is zoomed out too far to see it initially but upon zooming in, you see that’s where ten grand is buried, in the Firefox crop circle. Okay, it’s just a joke.

Another couple of guys actually took a moment out of their day to ask, Is Ten Grand Buried Here? Well, you could guess that it isn’t buried here. Or anywhere actually. That particular site uses IE-conditional comments to hide browser suggests for compliant browsers and for IE-users, it suggests good browsers to them. I mentioned that Opera users will start yelling when they find out they’re not being suggested.

Is Ten Grand Buried Here? No.

Now, there are other mentions from this mayhem too. Microsoft allegedly called Firefox a dull old browser. I haven’t any proof on that, I can’t find those words on anywhere anymore and someone suggested that it was edited out. Doing a google search at the time of this post causes a virused result to come up, that’s not good.

It’s been fun though. Good work Microsoft.

The new ad is pretty weird at first, a question is asked and then the bombardment starts. It’s epic in strangeness and you will remember it after you see it. The point of the these are to say simple that there is just too much nonsense returned when searching and by using Bing, well, you can find what you need faster. Of course you can, it’s a decision engine! I’m not sure anyone is going to use Bing just to search when Google is always in hand’s reach and there are dedicated sites to these things that aren’t run by Microsoft, which could be a problem in itself for some people. At least people will try out Bing now.

In reality ‘not-free’ is a weak argument given that the Window Server Web Edition is pretty inexpensive at around $300. The Web Editon is fully loaded with everything to get an ASP.NET app up and running although the database needs to be added separately.

Pretty inexpensive? Oh, suppose I’m just getting into web technology. Do you actually believe $300 can be cheap? I don’t even pay $30 for games, let alone server software when xampp can get me a fully work ftp/smtp/http/mysql server for nothing.

ASP.NET from the outside is seen as a big and bulky solution. Huge framework, huge runtime requiring large servers, lots of memory etc. This criticism is really leveled against Windows as the platform rather than ASP.NET since the bulk of those requirements are for the operating system.

When I first came to web development three years ago, not just html and css, but server side development, I never knew that there were other things. I made a website with a login system with ASP.net using built in tools. I only recently did that with PHP and my implementation is a huge mess.

I find this argument very common, but it’s also pretty weak given that high end hardware and memory are becoming so very cheap in recent years.

I doubt that many people setup their own servers. You go for shared hosting, or VPS or dedicated.

Compared to other solutions like PHP, Python or maybe even more drastically ASP Classic ASP.NET is a monstrous beast that can be a blessing for those that feel comfortable with the framework and know how to leverage the rich functionality, or a curse for those just starting out to become proficient and become overwhelmed and confused by the myriad of choices.

This was covered above, but let’s go over it again. Once, I wanted to compress my html code which was generated from ASP.net. You can do this with something called, iHTTP or something strange and totally ambiguous. In PHP, you can do it with a str_replace and ob_start. ASP.net is really easy to get started in. However it’s really hard to take seriously when doing something another thing can do in four seconds takes four months.

ASP.NET – at least using the Web Forms engine – uses a different approach to Web development that is based on abstraction and effectively hiding many of the HTTP semantics from developers. In some ways this can be very efficient and produce very rapid results if you know what you’re doing and you flow with this concept, but if you are coming from a raw HTML and CSS background or even as a developer from other tools that are based on raw HTML/CSS principles it’s actually difficult to get your head around the abstraction that Web Forms provides.

I honestly love the web forms in ASP.net. I wish PHP had something like them too. Really. It saves so much time. My computer teacher in 7th grade brought some security expert down to the room (he was a friend of his, not sure who he was exactly) and I was showing the interesting little no-change-address-redirect. That’s cool. You can’t do it in PHP. I’ve looked. You can’t do postbacks very easily in PHP. You can’t have such an elegant code container. By the way, IDE tools win for .net and fail for PHP (most of the time.)

ASP.NET has gone Stale

This is the last one. I can’t believe this either. I started .net before Vista was named as the next Windows OS. I was excitied for ASP.net 3 but then, I come out of the Vista experience disapointed. I might not have been doing any ASP.net work, but I was still a fan. I still don’t even know the state of the framework. They totally messed up the numbering. What is it now? 3.5 with LINQ?

That’s my ASP.net rant.