Good news for fans of Microsoft Office: now, thanks to a new joint promotion by Apple and those wacky monopolists in Redmond, you can purchase Office v.X for a price that's merely slightly predatory instead of outrageously predatory! Many thanks to faithful viewer Tom in TX for pointing out Apple's new "Office Party" offer, which chops a substantial $300 off of Office's full retail price provided you're a qualified buyer. There's just one teensy little catch: in order to become a "qualified buyer" and save those 300 clams, you're going to have to buy your discounted Office bundled together with a brand spankin' new Mac-- which, of course, will set you back considerably more than the $300 you'd be saving on the Office purchase. But hey, there's no such thing as free money. If there were, we'd be eating it like salad. Mmmmm, cash salad...

Still, if you were already in the market to replace your ancient IIsi anyway (which really deserves to retire, for crying out Pete's sake-- the poor thing just probably celebrated its 650th birthday in computer years, you slave driver) and you like the idea of being able to bring stuff home from the office and work on it without having to mess around with translating file formats and all that junk, then yeah, being able to tack a full copy of Office onto your iMac purchase for an extra $199 is a pretty solid deal. Even we have to admit that Office v.X is probably worth a couple hundred smackers to anyone who plans to do a fair amount of office productivity-type tasks on their new Mac.

See? We're not totally irrationally anti-Microsoft. We even shelled out a hundred bucks for an education copy of Word 5.1 some eight and a half years ago. (Of course, you'd have had to pay us an obscene amount of money to upgrade it to the abominable 6.0, but that's a whole 'nother basket of smelt.)

Noteworthy Detail Number One: while you can't apply the Office Party discount to educational purchases, this offer is valid with the Design Freely promo-- which means if you buy a Power Mac you can get a $200 copy of Office in addition to a totally free copy of the normally $699 InDesign 2.0. That's a whole lotta expensive software for cheap/free. What, no gratis copy of Shake for those of us who don't feel like plunking down an extra five grand for video compositing software? Maybe next time.

Noteworthy Detail Number Two: as you all know, it's pretty simple to get a sense of when Apple plans to release new Macs by examining the end dates of its special promotions. Well, lookee here-- the Office Party discount applies only to purchases made through January 7th, 2003. Seems to us that there's some sort of event or something that just happens to fall on that particular date... Holy cats, it's Macworld Expo! You heard it here first, people, so wake the kids and phone the neighbors: Apple might introduce new Macs at the January Expo! Yessirree, just call us "Scoop" Brady, for this is investigative journalism at its finest. Now where's our Pulitzer?