Submitted by Microsoft has released Office 365 Home Premium. Ars has a review up: “Just like Windows 8, this cloud-tethered version of Office may have a hard time convincing home users it’s time to upgrade. There are many useful new features in some of the most heavily used applications of Office, and the new add-in apps provide a useful way to pull external content into documents and presentations. The real question is whether customers – especially consumers – will buy into the service format.” You’re looking at EUR 100 per year for Office 365 Home Premium. Sure, it’s for five PCs – but one, who has that many PCs these days other than families, two, even among those families, how many need Office for five PCs, three, who doesn’t buy Office once and just installs it on all PCs in the house, and four, you can’t use it for commercial stuff. In other words, virtually everyone is better off buying regular, non-subscription Office 2013 Home & Student. You pay EUR 139 once (instead of EUR 100 every year), and it’s yours forever. I really don’t understand who the subscription service is for – it’s screaming for a single-license, EUR 25 per year option. Also, lose that ridiculous non-commercial bullshit.
As with so many other cases, this is probably not about selling it now but about “massaging people’s brain”:
It looks awful today, next year it will be somewhat ‘improved’ and better priced (and talked and reviewed)…
… the year after that another bit “better” and “familiar”, while retail prices will be going up or becoming more cumbersome (i.e. 3-pack licences only)…
… Add to this the walled garden scheme they are pushing and in a few years the service “option” becomes the “logical” choice… and the one we should use if we want to “save the children” 😉
Even if you bought the regular version, I’m not sure how many installs the product activation will let you perform before it gets cranky. I don’t know if a crack is readily available for that kind of thing either.
The Home Premium 365 subscription for $100 per year is generous – Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, and Publisher. For up to 5 devices. With 20GB of Skydrive space.
The surprising catch is the non-commercial clause. That about kills the deal. Though how would they know? In any case, for me the five installations would be overkill as I only have one laptop.
Too bad. I’d take 2 installs for $50 per year if the non-commercial clause was dropped.
Recurring fees for Office? No thanks. Getting raped by my ISP every month is bad enough.
£59.99
4 YEARS
2 PC/Macs
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-office-university-suite…
I got a chance to play with Office 2013 last night.
It’s nice, but its OpenDocument support has regressed. It steadfastly refuses to retain graphs when converting between ods to xlsx. I actually had to use a machine with Office 2010 to perform the conversion, and then transfer the resulting file back over. That worked perfectly.
“…virtually everyone is better off buying regular, non-subscription Office 2013 Home & Student. You pay EUR 139 once (instead of EUR 100 every year), and it’s yours forever.”
No, it’s not “yours forever.” You have LICENSED a product, not bought it. Your license is subject to many restrictions. For example, you can not legally move that product to a different machine once you’ve installed it, nor move it to a new computer if you buy one.
“I really don’t understand who the subscription service is for.”
It’s for Microsoft, of course. Since when have they ever kept the customer’s interests in mind?
My understanding was that the European Court of Justice had ruled that software licences could be sold on, so logically there should be no problem transferring the licence to another PC, at least in the EU.
It would be interesting to see how well a lot of these “legal” licence restrictions would hold up in a court of law.
this whole deal just means more libreoffice users. I guess I’ve never really gotten the whole office suite “power users” thing. Hopefully those users and those documents are becoming things of the past.
Things aren’t looking good for MS in general. With the US economy now actually shrinking it looks like they are doing everything they can to squeeze more revenue from their own customers. Perhaps soon we’ll that whole monopoly thing on the desktop will be a thing of the past (actually that’s been slowly happening anyways).
Edited 2013-01-30 22:49 UTC