Update: For those sending your kids off to college this year or next, consider this – Microsoft Office 365 University, then buy it here. This is a great value (and product), but make sure your student qualifies for this product before purchasing.
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Who hasn’t heard of Microsoft Office? That’s where Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other useful ‘office’ applications live. Microsoft Office has been around for ever, but has never been cheap. So many people look for less expensive (or free) alternatives like Corel’s WordPerfect Office, Sun’s StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, and others. Yet Microsoft still sets the standard for office applications that others (some very successfully) try to imitate.
If you happen to work for a large company that has a volume license agreement with Microsoft, or you’re a student or teacher, or you work for Microsoft, chances are you’re getting Office for a bargain price. For those less fortunate, a single Microsoft Office license could set you back hundreds of dollars, $400 to be exact for the full-meal deal (Office Professional 2013).
Enter Office 365, annually renewable software licensing, and cloud services. As PCWorld concludes in their article ‘Why Office 365 is a better deal than Office 2013‘, “Microsoft has set things up so that the decision has already been made. You are free to purchase Office 2013, but Office 365 has very clear advantages, and it makes more sense financially in almost every scenario.”
To be clear, comparing Office 2013 with Office 365 is not really an apples to apples comparison. For significantly less money (considering that you’ll get 5 user licenses with your Office 365 subscription), you get all the products offered in Office Professional 2013, 27gb of cloud storage with SkyDrive, 60 minutes per month of international calling with Skype, ‘Office on Demand’ (which I’ll explain in a moment), and access to free updates of these Office products as long as your Office 365 subscription is valid.
For someone who has been paying the ‘Microsoft tax’ forever (meaning, you can’t live without Microsoft Office so you keeping paying for upgrades year after year), Office 365 is great news and the price point is fantastic! It’s not free, but if you depend on such things as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, and Publisher, and you’re addicted to Outlook as I am, then ‘free’ just doesn’t cut it and I’m thinking this is a pretty fair price to pay for what you’re getting.
So, a little bit about Office on Demand, which I think is so cool! What this means is, if I’m away from my home or work computer, I can stream a full version of Office to an Internet-connected PC and keep working on my documents (which are stored ‘in the cloud’). One of the reasons I really like this feature is that it minimizes the issue of your home PC being a single point of failure, since you can be productive on any PC, anywhere.
If you read my recent blog post about Outlook.com, you saw me beating up Microsoft and at the same time defending Google. I am a Google and Gmail fan. On the other hand, I have never really been a Google Docs fan. Google made an honest attempt to give Microsoft a run for their money in the office application space, but failed year after year to capture any meaningful share of the Office market. Now with Office 365, Microsoft has an opportunity to dominate the office segment of the cloud services market.
Microsoft’s implementation appears to be solid, pricing is fair, and they’re not holding back any of the functionality serious home and business users desire. Way to go Microsoft! You have done a good thing here! But I’m still not lightening up on my Outlook.com comments. It’s just too bad both products had to enter the market around the same time because it’s causing some confusion for consumers. Anyway, Office 365 seems to have hit the mark. Try it out, you might like it…
