The company plans to charge corporate customers a monthly subscription of $15 per user for a suite of "hosted" software, which includes e-mail, Web meeting, collaboration and messaging applications running on Microsoft's computers.
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2008-02-10
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Of course, once the genius CIO who okayed a subscription such as this for the entire company has a little talk with the CFO over such small matters as not having any depreciation for a subscription service and the effect of a baseball bat colliding with said CIO's head, things will probably look less rosy... 
Member since:
2006-01-10
I think this is great. The price? A little steep if you ask. Say you have a 10 000 person company. That's 180 * 10000 = 1.8 million dollars a year.
I'm sure some companies are going to cost that out in terms of equipment, tech support, installation... and maybe find it is cheaper to do it in house.
They should drop it down to at least Google's level of 50 dollar a year.
That's 500K a year total for a 10K company. Heck the costs are probably justified just for the IT teams salary 
Member since:2006-10-10
A company with 10k users are not going to be looking into a service like this. My company is 1500, at most and staffs an IT department. Not a very large one, but enough that we get the job done, complete with an SAP helpdesk and developer staff.
This is meant for the under 500 user companies. Ideal for the 20 to 30 employee ma and pa shop that employs no one with any IT experience (like a machine shop).
By the by, I believe Google's domain and infrastructure hosting services are still cheaper, and probably more effective.
Member since:2006-01-06
I dunno about that. Google still has a VERY hard sell to convince customers to pay for Google Office. Google might be willing to drop the price REALLY low (eg. ad-funded) to pick off the low-hanging fruit, but it remains to be seen whether they can grab many MS Office customers. This is a pretty smart move by MS, in my opinion. It seems to blunt the impact of Google Office/Apps.
Edited 2008-07-08 23:34 UTC
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Large companies aren't the target market for this service. It's all about providing IT infrastructure (servers, doc and mail hosting, etc) for smaller companies that can't afford it. My understanding is that Microsoft is providing hosted access to the MS Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc). Everything lives in the cloud and is accessible via TS. When you compare $15 per seat to the cost of maintaining IT infrastructure, it seems that it's not as expensive as you'd think. It probably doesn't scale to a 10K person company but, then again, a company of that size already has IT infrastructure and doesn't need this level of service.
Edited 2008-07-08 18:55 UTC
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Microsoft would much rather sell a subscription to use their products, rather than trying to convince Joe Public to upgrade to the newest versions of Windows, Office, etc.
This is where Microsoft has wanted to go for a long time, and in fact they have been incrementally moving in this direction. In some ways, the biggest corporate customers are already on a form of subscription-based software.
Member since:2006-10-10