Star Microsoft Sets Pricing, Fee Sharing For Services
Linked by Tony Steidler-Dennison on Tue 8th Jul 2008 14:25 UTC
Microsoft 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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RE: Great for small companies
by tomcat on Tue 8th Jul 2008 18:55 UTC in reply to "Great for small companies"
tomcat
Member since:
2006-01-06

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 ;)


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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