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.
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.
Way to go Microsoft…
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…
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
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.
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
Yeah, I agree about the office app thing. I was speaking more to the domain/email hosting functions that Google offer users. Chances are, the PCs these people will run will be bundled with Office anyway.
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
…to the 21 century guys. Only question now is if this particular IT utility concept will actually prove profitable.
Software as a service is already working great for IBM, but they have a total solution approach which includes hardware and services.
Indeed. The only thing shocking here is the fact they didn’t do it sooner.
How do you think Bill got to be one of the richest man in the world and Steve the only CEO in the world that became billionaire?
My only regret is that the price is not in the range of $15 per second per typing fingers.
Ah, so you’re saying that because someone has a history of success we should take for granted they’ll never make any mistakes?
Tell that to Napoleon.
a suite of “hosted” software, which includes e-mail, Web meeting, collaboration and messaging applications
Strip and sell, strip and sell…
By the way shouldn’t one ask wether the OS itself isn’t enough?
People are complaining about Apple’s price, and this one is even more, per year. Just classic.
If blizzard can convince people to pay $15 a month for WOW i don’t think MS is on a bad idea here.
There will always be a niche for pay as you go.
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.
Welcome to the 21st century, where your life is spent one monthly bill at a time.