back to article Price cuts, new features coming for Office 365 small biz customers

Microsoft is still keen to shift its perpetual-license Office customers over to the Office 365 subscription model, and to that end it's planning a shakeup of its Office 365 plans for small and midsized businesses to offer customers more value and greater flexibility. Beginning on October 1, Redmond will launch three new Office …

  1. Stu 18

    testing 1 2 3

    We have office365 at home, basically because my wife uses publisher. We have office 2010 at work without upgrade ass because I've never though that paying twice up front was a good idea. My experience with 365 so far is that saving stuff is very slow (even on a fibre internet connection) because of one drive and also the software has broken itself twice (i.e. won't start at all) in the 5 months we have had it. So far Office 2010 install is much more resilient, the only reason to switch to 365 rental mode is to move it from an "asset" to an expense in the accounts book in a year or two.

    1. karlp

      Re: testing 1 2 3

      If you have 365 at home, that means you have hard apps, and hard apps can save and open from your local drives just like always.

      If you choose to store all your stuff in One Drive, that can certainly add some lag. This is particularly true if they are large files. Hopefully you aren't storing things in OneDrive "just because", but instead for a valid reason which justifies the occasional lag of using any WAN solution.

      I can't speak to your experiences with needing to repair unfortunately.

      What I will say however is that the one-time(isn) CAPEX vs ongoing OPEX question is becoming bigger every day. That is particularly true now that MS has made using anything other than proper OpenLicense Office very painful for all but the smallest SMB.

      It makes a lot of sense to go O365Biz when the decision is 15$ (now 12.50$) a month / 180$ (now 150$) a year per employee (which includes hosted exchange, share point, OneDriveBiz, Etc) when the alternative is 466$ per employee up front + server software + cals, etc.

      Of course the funny (in the most sad and traumatic of ways) part to all of this is after you get all the open licenses purchased, server software deployed, CAL's loaded, etc - Someone from sales is going to call you for support because they just signed up for 15 seats of office 365 as they absolutely needed powerpoint on their iPads and now they want to figure out how to pull files from the central server. Oh - and while your here - the CEO was down yesterday receiving a presentation, saw powerpoint on the iPad and now wants to talk about getting this to everyone middle management and above.

      1. Fihart

        Re: testing 1 2 3 @karlp

        Hello Karl, head office in Redmond has noted your efforts and your prospects are looking up.

    2. Wade Burchette

      Re: testing 1 2 3

      I've had to repair Office 365 multiple times too on different computers. You are not alone there.

  2. Stu 18

    and one more thing

    So it is more expensive if you have more users?! >300. I suppose I should be glad that the SMBs finally get to feel special for being to small to get corporate level discounts. But whaaaaaaat?

    1. karlp

      Re: and one more thing

      The bigger boys get access to the things they tend to need, such as legal hold, advanced message filtering, yada yada yada. Whether they should be forced into it or not is a different question, but that is neither here nor there.

      As for quantity discounts - If you truly get big enough you tend to negotiate your rates by way of an over-archving enterprise agreement where you acquire your 365 licenses along with the rest of your traditional MS products via that channel instead.

  3. Nolveys
    Trollface

    Price Metrics

    I wonder what the before and after prices would look like expressed in dollars per uptime.

    1. DNTP

      Re: Price Metrics

      #DIV/0! whenever you have a big project due tommorrow.

  4. Tom 35

    For people who don't buy every upgrade

    Loads of people went from 2003, to 2010, and are not even thinking of 2013... how much more will Office 365 cost people like that? Of course that's the reason MS (and Adobe) are pushing the rental model.

    And once they force every one onto the rental plan they will not even have to bother updating the software until the free software catches up at least.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: For people who don't buy every upgrade

      Free software (OS / Office / Email) has already caught up, at least as far as I've used it. The greatest problem it the "how we've always done it" mentality.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: For people who don't buy every upgrade

        Free software (OS / Office / Email) has already caught up, at least as far as I've used it. The greatest problem it the "how we've always done it" mentality.

        Absolutely. The only problem I have is deciding between LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I get on better with LibreOffice, so I think I'll stick with that but cross compatibility seems not to be a problem. The main benefit here is that we have one and the same interface over 3 platforms, 2 of which we use actively (OSX and Linux), and, of course, the costs-

        BTW, there is an extra risk using Office 365. For those who have not followed Microsoft over the last few years, a hint. It has a history of lowering prices to lure you into their clutches. As soon as you become dependent on them, guess what the prices do?

  5. Hagglefoot
    Big Brother

    Don't you get it Microsoft I don't want to store my intellectual property on your servers, I don't want your bots trawling through my documents and ideas and then suddenly launching them as your own, I don't want your 'we thought you might like this' ads in my face or your mate who is a tosser brought this so we thought you might like to be a tosser too. I just want a very personal stand alone, document, spreadsheet, database, publisher that I am in complete control of and where my ideas are my own to develop in my own time and compete in the marketplace if I ever get the money and time to do so.

    And that goes for all you 'Cloud' or 'Fog' providers.

    1. Wibble

      Why update at all?

      Office 2003 was the zenith of Office development. All releases since then add little and completely screw usability.

      FFS table formatting is still broken; formatting images is painful; it still crashes.

      Don't fall for Microsoft's money making scam. You know it's not worth it.

  6. Abacus

    Softmaker anybody?

    Softmaker Office fits the bill for me. Got me off the MS treadmill, excellent compatability, nicer than the open source alternatives and upgrade from FreeOffice is cheap as chips.

  7. NJobs

    Cloud is still more expensive...

    The only winners with Microsoft's Cloud products remain the vendor and the partners / resellers whom are being offered gifts and incentives to drive Microsoft's desperation to move on-premise perpetual volume customers to the Cloud subscription option.

    Most businesses (small, medium and large) still face increased costs over the period of product usage (compared to perpetual volume) as most businesses do not migrate every 3 years (more like every 6) so do not be fooled by the relentless Microsoft hype. The fact is that Enterprise customers have been very resistant to taking up Office 365 to date and this is why Microsoft is now attacking the small-mid sized market.

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