Microsoft offers discount to college students

                Tufts students looking to upgrade to Microsoft's highly anticipated Windows 7 operating system (OS) are in luck, as Microsoft announced last week that college students will be eligible to purchase the program for $29.99, one quarter of the normal $119.99 minimum recommended selling price. Windows 7, Microsoft's follow-up to the much-maligned Windows Vista OS, is scheduled to be released on Oct. 22.
    Microsoft launched the student discount promotion through the Web site win741.com, designed to promote the OS to college students. Students need only to have a valid .edu e-mail address to be eligible for the reduced price, which will be in effect until Jan. 3, 2010. Once students enter their e-mail address, they will be sent a confirmation e-mail with instructions on how to purchase the OS at a reduced price.
    Windows 7 comes in three retail varieties in the United States: Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. College students will be able to purchase either Home Premium or Professional at the discounted price.
    Sophomore Walker Holahan, a computer science major who has begun using the new operating system, believes that the upgrade to Windows 7 is a worthwhile purchase — especially if it comes at a reduced price.
    "Basically it strips away all the things about Vista that are bad ... but it also has a lot more features that are more user-friendly than Vista was," Holahan said. "I think [Microsoft] is really pushing for everyone to go to 7 from XP and Vista," he said.
    Holahan, however, is not sure college students are the ones Microsoft needs to be targeting with its Windows 7 advertising. "I worked with people who are not as computer literate as college students tend to be this summer, and a lot of them are still using XP ... because they had a very hard time switching from XP to Vista," Holahan said.
    Jeff Bertolucci, a writer for the information technology Web site CIO.com, argues that if Microsoft is truly driven to get XP and Vista users to upgrade, it should make the reduced price universally available.
    "If you're running Vista on a home PC, you'd really have to loathe your operating system to shell out $120 for Windows 7. I suspect that most consumers won't bother. As usual, they'll wait until they buy a new PC before upgrading to the newest version of Windows," Bertolucci wrote in a blog entry.
    Even though Microsoft would likely make less money selling Windows 7 at $30 in the short term, he wrote, "the positive buzz generated by a low-cost upgrade would help in the long run ... Good PR could go a long way."
    Microsoft is not the first software company that has offered a considerable discount to college students. Adobe offers large student discounts on all its Creative Suite 4 (CS4) products, such as Flash, Photoshop and InDesign. Students can also find smaller discounts on computer hardware from the likes of Dell, HP and Apple.
    Some believe that Microsoft's reduced price for college students is an attempt to match the price of Apple's popular new 10.6 OS, Snow Leopard. According to the NPD Group, a retail sales tracking firm, Snow Leopard sold twice as many copies as Apple's 10.5 Leopard OS and four times as many as its 10.4 Tiger OS during their respective first two weeks on store shelves.
    A large part of the brisk sales can be attributed to the fact that Snow Leopard launched at an unprecedented low price of $29 for a single user pack and $49 for a five-user family pack. Previous Mac operating system upgrades had been priced at $129.
    One has only to look at any gathering place on campus to see that Apple computers are more popular among Tufts students than their worldwide market share of about three percent would suggest. According to a 2008 report by Investment Bank Morgan Stanley (now Morgan Stanley Smith Barney), 40 percent of students polled said that their next computer purchase would be a Mac.
    Aside from similarities in price point, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are both seen as relatively minor upgrades to their predecessors — their main selling points are improvements to performance and usability. Still, Preston Gralla, a writer for ComputerWorld.com, points out that Microsoft and Apple have taken different approaches to their new operating systems.
    "[Microsoft] didn't dramatically change the under-the-hood plumbing in Windows 7; however, significant interface changes and features were added," Gralla said in an article comparing the two operating systems. "Apple, on the other hand, focused its efforts largely on internal plumbing."
    Students — and all other consumers — who purchased a Windows PC after June 26 will be eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 7 on Oct. 22. Microsoft also offered a $50 pre-order promotion during the summer.
    Students who use the promotion, however, will not be refunded the $20 difference. Even so, deciding whether or not to upgrade from Windows XP or Vista has a new factor to consider.