Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Trials Outlook Premium For $4 Per Month, With No Ads and Custom Domains (pcworld.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sweet-spot dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Microsoft is testing a premium version of Outlook.com that removes the ads and supports custom domains for email addresses. According to Brad Sams at Thurrott.com, Outlook Premium is free for one year and then costs $3.99 per month during the trial phase, though it's only available by invite for now. The service appears to combine two features that Microsoft offers or has offered in the past. The first is an ad-free version of Outlook, which is already available today as a $20 per year upgrade. The second is custom domains, which allow users to enjoy Outlook.com's features but with a personalized email address. Outlook Premium could also slightly undercut Google's Apps for Work plans, which support custom domains for $5 per user per month. It also offers a middle ground between ad-free Outlook and a full Office 365 subscription. While Outlook Premium may be tempting for a select few, general users may be hard-pressed to pay anything for Outlook, let alone $4 per month.

4 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Ads? by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously? Who actually sees ads at this point? If you aren't running an Adblocker you are just setting yourself up for malware and worse. I haven't seen an online ad in 10 years.

  2. Re:Irony of Microsoft by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It isn't ironic at all. Drug dealers do the same thing: first hit is free. It works.

  3. Free webmail is now a commodity by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Instead of creating new content and apps, the legacy desktop software vendors of the world -- Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, etc. -- continue to subscription-wall their suites in order to try to move users into constantly paying for stuff, forever, rather than forcing them to upgrade every few years. Unfortunately (for them), the younger, more tech-savvy Facebook generation isn't going to buy into their rent-seeking model -- they'll just find another "free" option and use that until it's gone or crapified to the point of being useless (heck, a lot of Adobe's products are mostly there already). The desktop software world will probably look a lot different in another decade, for the first time since the birth of the Internet.

  4. Re:Irony of Microsoft by ProzacPatient · · Score: 5, Informative

    Creating a new account on Windows 10 REQUIRES an e-mail address at Outlook.com

    Actually you can still add a local user account during or after setup.

    See also this and this.

    .