Discussion on:

The Upside: Big year ahead for Microsoft

I agree that the upcoming year is likely to be a big year for Microsoft, but not for the reasons you mentioned. They will release a new version of Exchange and Office. Those are almost assured to be successful and will drive revenues up. Windows 8, the Surface, and Windows Phone 8 will take more time to become popular.

hardware vendors to include a copy of Win 8 as part of all their hardware sales and then point to the great sales shown, despite all the systems that come with the backwards upgrade to Win 7 where people wipe Win 8 and load Win 7.

What should be looked at to see if Win 8 is a success is how many copies are sold as retail packs and not with new hardware, and compare that with the rate of past retail sales.

In fact more positive now than it has ever been. When I can buy a suite of products as good as Office 2010 for $100 OEM, then it is hard to be critical. Adobe want to charge me $700 just for Acrobat - lucky I can upgrade. MS's approach to security also now seems good, while Windows 7 is a great OS. Fingers crossed for Windows 8. Office 2013 I am sure will be good.

BTW my first experience with MS was with word processor and spreadsheet ROM packs on an Australian Dulmont Magnum - the world's first notebook computer in 1980.

to be wasteful of time and wasting space on the work area. I prefer the look of Office 2003 but Microsoft made sure it don't work well with the new generation of Windows. Thus I use Libre Office and it's free while doing a better job than MS Office as unlike MS Office it will safely and natively open and work with the older MS formats of Word and Excel - something MS Office does NOT do. Libre Office also work nice on PDFs and has a one click way to create a good PDF.

BTW Where and what version of MS Office 2010 do you get for just $100.00 - the best deal I can see around with a disc (ie. not just a licence) is for a Student pack which requires you to be a registered student of an approved educational institute and the it only has Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and One Note for $129.00 - you need another $300 if you want the version with Access and Publisher.

I bought OH&S for 60 with a new computer this year. I agree that Office 2007 was c__p, but 2010 is IMO better than 2003. Only problem is that it is difficult to customise macro buttons. If you use the quick access toolbar, you rarely need the ribbon (which I also don't like, but which you can minimise). I use an old (genuine) version of 2003 which gives me Access, Project and Visio. I also use OpenOffice from time to time.

Which means anyone can buy it for personal use, even in Australia (where I also live), though I bought it for STG60 in UK.

around here all follow the rules from Microsoft about student copy sales and ask to see some ID and your current student registration, noting them on the sales record.

Mind you, I talking A$ not US$ and that may change the price a little.