The future direction of Office and Office 365

Office 365 is a Microsoft cloud subscription service that provides the Microsoft Office suite of applications plus other services such as OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage solution, all for a fixed monthly fee. It has been around since 2011 when it replaced its Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS, which was aimed at corporate clients.

Office 365 is aimed at any Office user and is a much bigger step toward Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy than BPOS.

There are three non-commercial editions, three small and medium business editions, and several business editions. Each differs slightly in cost, feature set, and number of devices that can be used per user, to provide the flexibility that Microsoft customers need. And each comes with 1TB of personal cloud storage space included, courtesy of Microsoft OneDrive.

I believe it is a better option for any home user or business compared to purchasing Office software licenses and barring changes in strategy that cannot be foreseen at this time, it is the future of how Microsoft will sell most of its products.

Gone will be the old model with long development cycles and monolithic versions of software (Windows 7, Office 2013) that cost you a lot of changes every few years in the upgrade licenses and in the labor required to update your devices and train staff. and in its place will be the new monthly subscription model with continuous updates and integrated support services.

Although you can now choose between the two models, it makes sense from Microsoft’s point of view to move Office to a full subscription model at some point in the future. Any company prefers regular monthly income and incremental and manageable changes in its products to large, expensive and risky changes that may or may not generate income. Releasing a version of Windows or Office that doesn’t lead to increased revenue is money wasted and can lead to reduced revenue that is even worse.

And it’s better for us too, as we can handle smaller changes better than big ones. We are used to incremental changes in software thanks to our ubiquitous smartphones and iPads. We can save time and money on updating our workforce and training our staff. And, harder to measure but still important, the extent to which software changes differ from what we need and want will be less and it will be easier to reverse or amend an unpopular change.

Windows 8.1 and the subsequent Windows 8.1 update were big changes to the Windows 8 user interface aimed at fixing what people didn’t like about Windows 8, and Windows 10 is the ultimate culmination of those changes. Instead, imagine that the initial changes were added gradually. Either we’ll have time to get used to them or Microsoft will have time to get away from them if they prove too unpopular. Either way, we are both better.

Being able to run Office applications on iOS or Android gives us more flexibility in the options of our devices and in the duration and structure of our workday. I can read and make small edits to documents on my phone and make more detailed changes on an iPad or Android tablet. Depending on how much time I spend creating documents from scratch, and how long I read or slightly modify existing documents, I can be more productive on the go than ever.

Changing software costs from every few years to every month helps our bottom line just as much as it helps Microsoft, especially since we can easily increase and decrease our commitments based on our personnel changes. If someone leaves you stop paying for them, if you get a new staff member you add it to your bill.

If only all of our business costs could be managed this way.

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