Free Office 365 Access Given To Students In New York City Public Schools

Recently Google revealed that one of their goals is to nab 80% of Microsoft’s Office market share, which we have to admit is a rather ambitious goal especially when you consider just how many people, both in the enterprise and consumer sector rely on Microsoft Office for work, school, and personal use.

However it seems that Microsoft will not be taking this lying down as they have recently announced that 1.1 million students in the New York City Public School district will now have free access to Office 365. The Office 365 ProPlus benefits will now be given to students and teachers free of charge, meaning that they will be able to access Microsoft’s suite of Office apps, along with access to the OneDrive cloud storage.

There are some caveats and that is they will only be given 5 downloads each for the Office apps, and 5 additional downloads of Office to mobile devices, like the recently released Office for Android and last year’s Office for iPad. However with so many Office apps given away to students and teachers, how will Microsoft make their money?

We suppose in some ways this is a PR campaign and part of Microsoft’s CSR, but at the same time we reckon getting students used to using Office could ensure that in the future, they will continue to subscribe to Office 365 after they’ve left school.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Education, Microsoft, office 365