Instead of the traditional approach of charging users for a one-time purchase, Microsoft will be introducing a subscription model in the form of Microsoft 365 Home Premium, costing $99.99 for an annual subscription for up to 5 devices.
The new offering includes the latest and most complete set of Office applications; works across up to five devices, including Windows tablets, PCs and Macs; and comes with extra SkyDrive storage and Skype calling — all for US$99.99 for an annual subscription, the equivalent of US$8.34 per month.
Smart move I believe.
They know their grip on Office’s suite of products are loosening, and this trend is set to continue. To facilitate adoption across different devices in the household, in comes the new model.
The student deal is even better – $79.99 for a four-year subscription, that’s equivalent to $20 a year. It’s a no-brainier really. Locking in students and familiarizing them with MS’ products would go a long way in retaining the share of the shrinking pie.
Having said that, I believe Microsoft is probably forgoing sizable share of the iOS crowd by not developing an app for that market.
That’s all for the good stuff. Now for the big hoo-hah.
On the 64GB Surface Pro, only 23GB is available for use. The rest, well, they are already reserved for the operating system and built-in applications. Imagine the public outrage, opening up the device and realizing that they have lost 64% of the storage involuntarily to the system imposed by Microsoft.
According to the spokesperson, we can recover the space.
Users will be able to free up additional storage space by creating a backup bootable USB and deleting the recovery partition.
It’s irrelevant It’s not the job of a paying customer to clean up the mess. That’s a big deal, because not everyone is savvy enough to know this before committing to the purchase.
To put it blatantly, it’s deceptive.
When I buy something, I want it to work as advertised. I don’t want a nasty surprise waiting for me in the form of 41gig, out of 64gig have already been reserved for something I have no control over.
That’s two end of the scale, a promising looking service being overshadowed by negative coverage and controversy.