A Sweet Deal Indeed (Thanks Steve).

I really, really shouldn’t be doing stuff like this for free. However, until I figure out how to monetise it properly, I’ll just have to share the news and let the vendor, in this case Microsoft, get the free ad.

Microsoft is making Microsoft Office 2007 Student and Home Edition available at N6,500.00 for 6 weeks starting from the 15th of December, and you will be legally allowed to install it on up to 3 computers. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a very sweet deal. To give you some perspective, I saw the software currently available in a store for N18,000.00. So it will be going for about a third of the price. I should warn you though that this version contains only Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. So no Microsoft Access for the database aficionados and no Microsoft Outlook either. Still, the deal is a sweet one anyway you want to look at it.

This offer is available for Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. According to Microsoft, you can walk into any store where software is legitimately sold during that period and get it at that price. They should have advertising available prominently displaying the price. So no one should be able to get away with selling the pack at an inflated price.

So if you live outside these zones, you are out of luck. On the other hand, if you are a student of a British or American University, you get Office 2007 Ultimate and Windows 7 Professional at about $30 for Windows and $60 for Office Ultimate. You can access the student offers here. By the way, from my experience, if you are a student of an online program like the University of Liverpool Online, you can get these deals as the validation criteria is having a valid email address from an academic institution in these countries. So if you have an “.ac.uk” or a “.edu” email address, then you are well on your way to getting good software at rock bottom, yet legitimate, pricing. Now they would only extend that offer to Nigerian Universities where we really need those kinds of offers… 

Of course, as I have mentioned before, you can get OpenOffice.org at a much better price: completely free and it can do most things that Microsoft Office can do. You just need to download and install. Most of us, do prefer MS Office. We grew up with it and is the de facto standard that everyone else is playing catch up to. Still, free is free is free.

Be that as it may, we appreciate Mr. Ballmer’s magnanimity. Thanks Steve, nice one.

Dej.

 

Webify Your Trade

Over the last couple of weeks, I spoke to two people I know who sell things as a secondary source of income. One of them sells clothes, shoes, perfumes and accessories. The other person sells cars. In the two separate discussions, I asked for their website so I could go online and check out their wares. I was half-joking, since I really wasn’t interested in anything they were selling, but it made me think when both of them told me they didn’t have one. What made this particularly thought provoking is that both of them are IT professionals in their day jobs and I would have thought that would have been a pretty obvious tool for their businesses to have.

So I started thinking about how easy it would be for them to set up a very professional looking website for free without too much effort. Having recently discovered a site that inventories all sorts of web building tools I felt I could look one or two of the better ones and do some sort of high level “how-to”. It’s not like I haven’t touched the subject of how easy it is to get really productive with the internet before. Maybe I just needed to be a bit more specific and talk through actually building a site.

On the other hand, perhaps I should step back and look at the basics again: why should you have a website for your business? Is it really worth the effort? What are the wins? I tend to assume that this is 2009 and everyone appreciates the Web and what an enormous opportunity it is. Maybe not. Some of these points are almost childishly obvious, but I think it is worthwhile to talk about them. Well, here goes.

 

1. A website is a worldwide catalogue of your products and services.

When you create a site and post your goods or services to it, anyone and everyone can have access to it. There are currently 10 million Nigerians on the Internet and that number is growing every day. Those are potentially 10 million people in your backyard who could see what you have to offer – never mind the other 1 billion people worldwide who could see it. Now you could decide that the only people you actually want to have access to your business are the 1000 or so people you can reach with your business card, phone calls, and pounding the streets under the African sun. Perhaps you prefer to stand in your shop door and hope they see your signboard and stop by. Otherwise a website is a great way for maximum exposure.

 

2. You are easy to reach.

Assuming you provide an email address on the site (I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t) then you have provided an easy means for customers to reach you for inquiries and to place orders. If you invest in a Blackberry or even a low cost data-capable phone and a Zain N1,000 internet connection, you can check for messages on the go.

 

3. Always open for business.

A website is a shop that never closes. When you have turned out the lights, closed the curtains and turned the key in the lock, a website is still running providing people with access to your business. The more capability you provide on a website, the more of your business customers can experience.

 

4. You Build a contact list.

The secondary benefit of email is that you can now build up a contact list in a digital form. Just from the email addresses of people who email you, you have a growing list of people that you can contact with targeted marketing and product offers. You have to do this (the marketing) with care and permission otherwise it will be seen as spam. Aside from the email, you could have a contact form on your site that can captures more useful details from the customer. This is actually a method of market research. You can get a sense of what your customers want. Customers will be more willing to do this if you provide some kind of incentive or the other. For instance, you could offer a 10% discount on their first purchase. You can even have one of those features that asks them to invite a friends. These referrals are great ways to increase your customer base as people are more willing to accept offers or solicitations that come through people they know and trust.

 

5. You can update changes to your business information or service profile without much expense.

When you print a business card, handbill, or print catalogue, if anything changes you have to reprint, or as some do, modify things by hand. While having a website doesn’t eliminate that entirely, with a few online edits you can ensure that the largest part of your potential audience always has the most current and accurate business information.

 

6. You can actually make money from it.

You can set up your site to be a proper ecommerce site where people can actually pay for goods and services that you then deliver to them. Now this will take a bit more effort and a bit more money to set up than just setting up a site, but if your product is the kind that can be sold this way (and it will surprise you what can be sold this way) it is worth the effort and the investment.

 

7. It makes you look good.

Having a website improves the value of your brand, especially if your site is well designed. It makes people believe that your product is as good as your site is.

 

These are just a few simple reasons to set up a site for your business. Did I mention you can do it for free and in a short amount of time? Like everything else in life, there is even more that can be accomplished than what I have listed here, but that also requires a lot more work and I have mentioned them in various forms in older posts and will talk about them in through the lifetime of this blog. If anyone has more reasons to add the ones I have listed, please feel free to post them as comments. With next post I’ll do a proper how-to. I’ll setup a site using one of the free tools and let you see how it turns out.

Dej.

A Price of Zero

Most Lagosians who started working with computers about the same time that I did had their first experiences with computers assembled from parts bought in the legendary Otigba Street area of Ikeja. It wasn't just the hardware that came from Otigba. The software came from there too - and it was pirated. Many a sophisticated computer user today would never have had the software their life depends on if not for the “Mega” CDs that put thousands of dollars worth of software on single CDs that sold for not more than a few hundred naira.

Now many of us actually pay the authorised price for software. We may not agree that the price is fair - and the truth is that software pricing can be fairly arbitrary, but those are what the people who invested their time and energy in developing the software want us to pay. We can agree to pay the price - otherwise the only right thing to do is not use the software. In any case, companies like Microsoft are heavily investing in all sorts of mechanisms to protect their software from unauthorised use.

Despite my Otigba roots, I strongly advocate that people pay the legal price for the software they use. Because I work in IT, a lot of people have approached me to "help" them install Microsoft Office on their computers and Norton Antivirus on their new laptops. I always advise them to buy authorised copies. Often times they don't take the suggestion seriously.

The thing is software isn't cheap. Windows itself makes up a significant part of the cost of a prebuilt computer. Office is another 200 dollars or so depending on the version - and antivirus software can be an annual subscription as much as 40 dollars. Which is why I also suggest to people use free and open source versions of the software.

There are lots of free alternatives to the software we have grown used to. Many of them work the same way as the more familiar ones. Even those with fewer features are very attractive at the price they come at. I'll give examples of free software and the familiar non-free software that they replace. Everyone of them can be downloaded from the internet.

Ubuntu Linux (alternative to Microsoft Windows).

Windows is the only computer operating system most of us know, but there are a huge number out there. Ubuntu Linux is probably the easiest one for Windows users to grasp with the least amount of effort. The thing about Ubuntu and other forms of Linux is the that they belong to an entire ecosystem of free software. Linux is also less prone to viruses obviating the need for antivirus software.

Openoffice.org (Alternative to Microsoft Office).

Openoffice.org (yes, the “.org” is part of the software’s name) is a full featured office productivity software suite. It includes the usual suspects – a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program and even a database tool. It's greatest strength as an alternative to the Microsoft suite is that it can create, open and save most files created in Office without losing the formatting. This means that you can have Openoffice.org on your home PC and still be able to use files that were created by office users or create documents at home and use them on Microsoft Office installations.

AVG Antivirus Free (Alternative to Norton/MacAfee/CA antivirus).

There are several free antivirus suites out there. Many of them are free offerings that are a reduced feature version of a paid for version. For example AVG Free is the free version of AVG antivirus suite. Avast also has free version. Many of these free versions have limited feature sets devoid of things like antispyware, firewalls, spam filters and other security tools. On the other hand, there are many standalone products that do these things by themselves and they are free.

Gimp (Alternative to Adobe Photoshop).

For those who do their own photo-editing, both professional and otherwise, Photoshop is the preferred choice. Of course, only the truly professional are willing to pay the hefty premium the software fetches. Adobe have some scaled down versions that are cheap, but for a completely free alternative, the Gimp is the most preferred choice.

DoPDF (Alternative to Adobe Acrobat).

We all use PDFs, the Adobe document format that is the preferred format for storing and sharing completed documents. Historically, to create them you had to have the full Acrobat software - which isn't free, separate from the reader which is free. Now very many tools can save as PDF including OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007. There are also standalone PDF "printer" software such as DoPDF that after installation you treat like a printer and print any document to and it creates a PDF. This is one of those examples where the non-free application gives you many more capabilities, but most of us don’t need those features.

These are just a few examples of free software all which will run on Windows and Linux (except the antivirus which is Windows only). I have deliberately left out internet-based options - software that only works in a web browser while you are connected to the internet.

Let’s do something. Post a non-free software that you use in the comments, and I’ll try to point you at a free alternative. You can also do this via my twitter account.There is a whole constellation of rich software for the very attractive price of zero that are more than adequate to your needs.

Dej.