Why does Home and Student edition not include Outlook?

Good question in today from Andrew Balgarnie - if you have a question or something you'd like me to comment on or look into just use the email link on the header.

He says "Given how much you sing the praises of oneNote / outlook integration why doesn't the home / student office bundle include outlook? "

As he says, I do think the outlook integration to OneNote is very strong (watch my demo). So why take Outlook out of the lead edition, Home and Student?

With the 2007 release we dropped the restriction imposed in Office Student and Teacher edition 2003 that you have to be in education and we took the decision to open this up to all home users with Office Home and Student edition, instead imposing a different restriction that it is only for non-commercial use.

When composing what goes into the non-commercial edition and what into the commercial editions - small business edition being the main one closest to H&S, we needed to create some space between them so we can offer H&S at the lower price point.  Our research showed that only 11% of home users use Outlook for their email - most use either Outlook Express or a web offering like hotmail, yahoo or googlemail.  Therefore not including Outlook 2007 would have a limited impact.

Putting OneNote in H&S makes a lot of sense since it is targeted at students and it puts OneNote, a relatively newer application, on a bigger stage.  So we put that into H&S and kept Outlook in the business skus like Small Business Edition since every small business seems to want Outlook. 

Packaging is always a difficult compromise but doing it this way meant we could carve out a home edition at a lower price without affecting the business edition and at the same time introduce OneNote to a very wide market.

Ways to buy Outlook

If you are drawn to Home and Student edition but are missing Outlook, you could do the following:

• Not buy H&S in the first place but instead consider Office Standard, Office Small Business, Office Professional or Office Ultimate.  Here is the comparison grid.
• Ultimate Steal - if you own an ac.uk email address you can buy Office Ultimate for £38.95!
• Outlook standalone - of course there is nothing to stop you buying Outlook 2007 in the shops.