I love Word, PowerPoint and Excel. They form a core of applications that everyone can use to make good things happen. I like them better than any other alternative because they actually do work, flawlessly. For the last, maybe, eight months, I have been beta testing the Office 2010 Professional editor. It was recently released in June without so much as a single Ad on TV or in the newspaper.

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.