I saw this earlier today.seems like a decent deal, but i'm not sure about office 365 yet... last time i purchased ms office i got the latest version for $20... so not sure why I would pay a lot more for 365 :/

In my opinion, office 365 is stupid for students or anyone in academics. For a word processor, what more do you need other than some fonts and spell checker? Most academic computers don't have the latest version of office, so using the latest version of office causes lots of compatibility issues at school. Also, if you do presentations on powerpoint, you don't need much. Being in academia in medicine, the most important thing that you are taught about doing a presentation is that the powerpoint should only be white background/black letters with minimal color and no animations (also no more than 8 words by 8 lines per page). Unless you're a sales person that is making a powerpoint presentation with all fluff, colors, and animations without any substantial substance, Office XP is more than adequate for regular academic use. You can use dropbox or google drive for cloud. Likely for presentations, the academic computer usually doesn't have cloud anyways, so you'll need an USB flash drive.

Dumb marketing, joining together of two unrelated products. I mean, I understand that xbl is lagging this late in the gen, and windows is lagging, and therefore Office sales will do the same, but from a buyer's perspective, they might as well join a pickup truck with porn for all of congruity both markets will share

pick up trucks and porn go great together too!

Couldn't hurt......and clearly you aren't familiar with these types of promotions.

Like getting free theatre movie passes when you use certain credit cards enough. They exist......movies combined with banking. Crazy right?

But the promotion is about letting you have it, even if you don't want it at the time. Because eventually, because you have it, youll start to rationalize a way that you can use it and take advantage.

Case in point: A Office purchaser gets this free Gold offer. Does he have children? Does he game himself? He will at the least research what Live Gold is and once its discovered its $60 per year and mandatory for online, he may or may not rationalize getting a Xbox, thinking he has a deal on his hands.

Its nice that they give something extra but.. I really hate these subscribtion based software.. MS is doing it.. Adobe went for it.. they seem to be missing that in an economic crisis big businesses aren't going to replace perfectly fine working computers and certaintly not their software.. a lot of companies still use Word 2003 or 2007.. Changing their business model isn't going to help prevent that..

personally at work we are going to stick with Adobe CS6 for the next years.. I'm going to an African country for work for maybe 2 or 3 months but if I had the Adobe Cloud software i would be required to monthly check in with their servers.. which isn't impossible but certaintly not convienent.

software as a service in not the way we should go..

hmmm depends on your branch of study....

but I do not agree on the simple base that it is not only on what you need.... but what you should know for the day you will heavily rely on it for work.... if the only shit you know is the basics and even worst the basics of office XP you are a freaking hasbeen on the job market....

heck if you are not gonna spend money on a recent distribution of a soft you will need to use in your field of work go in the open source world then.... I'd recommand last version of oppen office over office XP to any student....

I understand your reasoning.... but current need for studying opposed to fuiture need knowledge in your field of work is very different.... and on powerpoint... I can't remember when I saw for the last time a black and white presentation.... I'd be a teacher I wouldn't tolerate such poor presentation in our day and age..... not knowing how to do use a tool like power point better for a 20 yo is outrageous.... it'd be like not knowing how to use a fountain pen last century....

with cloud computing, it is the only way it will go..... and will help those african countries actually.... because with cloud computing and software as a service it will not rely on high end hardware.... a raspberry pie will be able to run it... the only thing the govs or ONG will have to do is maintain infrastructures.... hardware will finally become more and more accessible.....

but I see your point... there will be a lot of bumps along the road.... but service based software and the cloud is the future for wide spread low cost deployement and access

Just seems like an odd choice of X going with Y.

Doubt it will get any traction, but cool for people buying O365.

Id consider it, but we have the MSDN for Software.

Man if I didn't already own Office 2010 and have Office 2013 on my tablet I'd definitely go for the Student Microsoft Office 365. Really good deal especially with that free year of Live included.