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Microsoft Reports New Subscribers For Office 365 Plunged 62% (itworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Microsoft is having trouble selling $7-a-month subscriptions to Office 365. In the last three months of 2016, Microsoft added just 900,000 new subscriptions -- and throughout all of 2016, subscriptions increased by just 4.3 million. In fact, a chart at IT World shows that new subscriptions actually peaked in a year ago, with a steady decline in new subscribers ever since. "In each of the last three quarters, Office 365 grew by about 900,000 subscribers, the smallest quarterly increase since early 2014," they write. "Prior to the nine-month stretch of 2016, subscribers were accumulating at rates two to three times larger per quarter."
This explains why Microsoft announced 97 new markets for the software nine weeks ago. So far after four years, Microsoft's found just 25 million subscribers for Office 365 -- and it's not clear how many of those came from their $100 five-user packages. (Although those figures suggest that Office 365 subscriptions are still earning Microsoft at least half a billion dollars a year.)
This explains why Microsoft announced 97 new markets for the software nine weeks ago. So far after four years, Microsoft's found just 25 million subscribers for Office 365 -- and it's not clear how many of those came from their $100 five-user packages. (Although those figures suggest that Office 365 subscriptions are still earning Microsoft at least half a billion dollars a year.)
they probably tried to sign-up, but couldn't.
... smart devices and applications.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Microsoft STILL hasn't figured out that most people prefer to own something than rent something.
Their quest for the almighty "endless-subscription" cash-cow is failing.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
People are getting tired of a company that sells shit that's worse and worse than what they sold a few years back.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
When OneDrive was unlimited I was a subscribers. But they reduced it and now they've reduced it again to 1TB. Rather than deal with the few people (their words) that were seriously abusing the feature, they dicked over everyone.
... for reduced functionality compared to previous Office versions, near total reliance on the cloud, server failures, and compatibility isues with people who were smart enough to not buy into this crap? Sign me up!
I hear they're offering a deep discount here.
Microsoft is having trouble selling $7-a-month subscriptions to Office 365. In the last three months of 2016, Microsoft added just 900,000 new subscriptions -- and throughout all of 2016, subscriptions increased by just 4.3 million.
That means the market is almost saturated, which is surely good news. This is always the trend with very successful products. Same thing is happening to Apple and its iPhone.
Why pay $7 a month for office when you can get LibreOffice, or use Google Docs or a bunch of other free options. Or alternatively if you really must have office buy Microsoft Office 2016 for a once-off cost of $265 AUD (about 3 years worth of Office 365 Subscription assuming they don't jack up the price) or your old version of office which probably does everything you want. Seriously, the ability to write documents and do spreadsheets is no longer a killer app that people are willing to pay lots of money for when they can get something that probably has 95% of the functionality for free.
Why buy M$ Office with a limited SUBSCRIPTION when LibreOffice is free and does a good-enough job for most users?
Yes, you need M$ stuff for specialized editing and for some plugins and external programs to work, but if you can get away with it, go the free and easy route. No subscription mess, no licensing issues, no vendor lock-in, no BSA citations, nobody bugging you to "get genuine" and no annoying Clippy.
LibreOffice isn't perfect -- I'll be the first to admit that -- but it gets the job done well enough.
*new* subscribers. I can only be a new subscriber once...after that i'm an existing customer. duh.
Once MS have 100% market share their new subscribers will fall to 0. Is this a bad metric?
The software business has become like a lot of others. There are constant tests to see how much abuse customers will accept.
With software, there are very complicated issues, such as the cost of training employees in a user interface. That lack of detailed technical knowledge of most customers makes it easier to abuse them.
Selling 4.3 million subscriptions for Office 365 last year doesn't sound like the kind of failure I would mind having!
If the issue is inability to keep subscription levels up as high as they peaked at, when O365 was introduced? I'd suggest several reasons that should be expected.
1. There was definitely some pent up demand for this product on the Mac side, considering Mac OS X users were stuck on Office 2011 as the latest version, until this finally came out.
2. A pretty sizeable number of the total O365 subscription base comes from people who qualified for educational discounts, offered by the high-school, college or university they attended. As far as I can determine? Once you buy one of these heavily discounted licenses for Office 365 this way, it effectively stays active indefinitely. (What seems to determine if the license lives on or expires is if the institution you purchased it through keeps renewing their annual agreement with Microsoft to keep offering it at a discount to people. Unless you attended a school that failed and went out of business, I'd assume the vast majority keep these arrangements active with Microsoft.) I *bet* every time a retail or corporate customer renews Office 365 (annually), Microsoft counts that as another "sale"? If so, the educational customers only wind up counting for that 1 initial sale, since they're not renewing it each year like everyone else.
3. I don't really think the latest Office release offered via O365 is that impressive compared to the one that came before it, for Windows users? My workplace purchased stand alone Office 2013 Pro licenses for a number of PCs, and it's so much like the latest release, you almost have to click "Help" and "About" to make sure which one it is. Many of the improvements are relatively minor and need to be pointed out to someone for them to even realize it's there. It feels to me like MS tries to get you onto the O365 subscription train by bundling cloud services with it, like use of their cloud based Exchange server for Outlook and cloud storage via "OneDrive". Some of that is actually compelling for *some* customers (mostly corporate), but it's worth little or nothing to a whole lot of others.
4. I'll state the reason last that I'm sure lots of Slashdot users were already saying first: Alternatives to Office are eating into its profits. Google Docs, for example, is increasingly used in school classrooms and runs on cheap Chromebooks. Still others are making do with OpenOffice or a variant of it, often on an open source Linux box.
About a year ago, they changed their offering and split it into so many different plans no one knows exactly what you get.
MSFT needs to immediately limit themselves to four plans:
1. Student
2. Entry-level
3. Power
4. Everything
And they need to make it very clear what these mean, in a single page document which is the same regardless of where you find it on Microsoft's site.
This is not a shocker. Office 365 is such a bad value.
Typing letters, doing a spreadsheet, desktop publishing is not the unique, selling point, must have product that has to work between management and staff.
Past optimisations between Windows, a CPU and a spreadsheet application helped with GUI and responsiveness due to less RAM, slow CPU's and desktop computer design compromises.
Commercial/gov users have their software paid in full, home users now have fast hardware and other great software options.
Home users want to get as far away from boring and expensive work applications as possible.
Other apps, quality non rental software, free software, open source can offer text and spreadsheet support.
The GUI is simple, support works, the app is fun for what it offers.
Microsoft is great for games, GPU's. The complex, boring work like Office GUI is not needed at home for or users.
Better supported apps exist for the average user doing simple, average computing tasks.
The early 1980's and 1990's rush to use, understand and study Microsoft application at home to be a better worker is over.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We're getting our 50 users off it. With the non-stop "Service" messages and the intrusive bullshit it keeps trying to push it has turned into a sinkhole.
For example, Outlook users get prompted to install a NFL calendar add-on to follow football season. When I called support they first told me it must be a malware we picked up somewhere. After getting even more irate they told me "oh, well, yes, we do push that and you can't turn those messages off".
Utter bullshit.
> Microsoft STILL hasn't figured out that most people prefer to own something than rent something.
For many years, I sold some software to small businesses (people smart enough to successfully run their own business). We sold the software for $149 or $189. Our competitor rented theirs for $59/month. This is software that businesses would use for years, so the comparison was:
$149 to buy it and use it for three years
$2,124 to rent it for three years
We had MANY potential customers choose the "cheaper" competitor even though we loudly explained the huge price difference on our web site amd anywhere pricing was mentioned. Potential customers asked us for a monthly option. Eventually we relented and offered the choice, while clearly telling new customers that buying costs a whole lot less. A lot of people chose the monthly option.
Once in a while, when I noticed somebody had been paying for four years or something, meaning they had paid five or ten times the purchase price, I just cancelled their billing.
I wonder how many of these "subscriptions" are effectively free, given away by MS to students because their educational institute has a licence, and its not just the student , its staff as well who are able to get a free subscription and install it on 5 machines they own. I think there is a VERY big gap between total number of subscription and ones that Microsoft actually make any income from.
I GLADLY pay 9 bucks a month for photoshop/LR All updates come automatically, never had a problem with it, and they usually come up with a new version every year on the old stand alone model, and the update was more expensive than the subscription.
Almost any other subscription service with those kind of numbers would be considered a runaway success. Even World of Warcraft, at its peak, had a fraction of that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
When Microsoft can figure out how to monetize information I share with them in exchange for an Office 365 account, sign me up!
I prefer G-Suite. Collaboration (in docs presentations and sheet) as well as drive space , calendars is very well done.
We switched from MS-Exchange in 2012 and it was just in time for our rapidly growing company...Now 3000+ people in Europe, US and Japan.
While some staff still have MS-Office , the majority prefer G-Suite.
So bottom line, we have a great solution which was much cheaper and improved collaboration by our decision to leave Microsoft.
Here's an investor presentation from last week (PDF). It's a long document, but the following is mostly derived from a couple of slides at the bottom of page 3.
It looks like their total revenues for Creative Cloud dipped a few percent and then recovered again over the period 2012-2015, and as of 2016 their annual recurring revenue for that area is up to around $3.5B, compared to annual revenue of around $2.5B back in 2012 when their subscription model was starting up.
Over the same four-year window, it appears that their subscription ARR has been increasing roughly linearly, while their non-subscription revenues are fast approaching zero.
In short, it looks like they are now better off than they were four years ago in terms of annual Creative Cloud revenue, by about 40% if they maintain their current subscription level.
Another figure they mention is current year-on-year subscription growth of 46% outside the US. However, they are deafeningly quiet on what proportion of their overall market that represents or the equivalent figure for US customers. Their overall growth rate is clearly far less than that, so it could be that they're successfully expanding into foreign markets and that's helping to drive their overall subscription growth (probably a good thing for Adobe) but it could also be that sales in foreign markets are covering up a significant reduction in the US as increasing numbers of US customers are cancelling their subscriptions (probably a bad thing for Adobe).
It's also difficult to tell how many subscribers they actually have, since there doesn't seem to be any breakdown of which of the available subscription plans are generating how much revenue or what sort of effects they see from volume licensing, subscribers from different countries, or subscribers paying in different currencies. If we guess an average subscriber is worth about US$500 per year to them in revenues, that would give them around 7 million current subscribers, but this could obviously be way off if say most of the revenues are actually from enterprise customers paying far less than the headline per-seat prices with their volume deals.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
My company pays for it. For work-related stuff, I use it. For everything else, I use libreoffice. I don't bother with Java installation though, so I lose some functionality/wizards/etc, but I'm fine with that.
Is office 365?
Seriously. Never heard of it.
You would only need to use Office 365 for 3 years before the subscription model starts to cost more than an Office 2016 Retail purchase. How many of you out there own a PC for more than 3 years? I have 2 PC's in my house more than 10 years old (upgraded to Vista or 7). The math on their subscription model doesn't even come close to being worth it over the lifespan of a PC.
Not only do I hate the subscription model but I hate the whole concept of cloud services seeing every document I type. Privacy and trade secrets implications for every document breaks so many HIPAA laws in itself. Blows my mind how they aren't getting sued for breaking a dozen privacy laws every millisecond. They can spy on any document I write and I would be paying them to do so? Nah I'm good I'll go somewhere else. I prefer all my documents to be viewed only on my physical machine and accessible by those with local accounts, for good reasons. Microsoft has completely lost touch with what it takes to make good software.
I went and tried out LibreOffice instead. To be perfectly honest I actually like LibreOffice better. The UI is simple and no frills. It's inviting, non-intimidating and harkens back to a time when word processing UI's made sense. It's what a simple word processor should be like. It can save in Word .doc or .docx format. My lawyer needed something in Word format and I sent him something created from LibreOffice. He never knew the difference. I've only needed to fire up LibreOffice once in the past couple of years. I'm not a big word processor user. Instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars for a one time use kind of thing I just used LibreOffice. Worked great.
For once, can we have a real discussion about this? I wonder what's the reason. Anybody have an *educated* guess?
1) Model changed: people are now using Dropbox Paper & Quip, Prezi (vs. PPT), Marketo (vs. Excel for BI), etc. instead?
2) They got 365 & found out they didn't really use it much. Then many didn't renew and there weren't enough new subs to both replace & surpass?
3) Did a direct replacement really succeed, for example Docs? I'm talking consumer & SMB's 5-10 employees, as 'm guessing they're the only ones buying these subs on an individual basis
Google Docs is another reason. Google Docs doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but it is "good enough" for most people. Instead of $7 per user per month, it is $0 per month. Google Docs also has less downtime.
The only reason I have anything at all to do with it is that corporate IT is enforcing it. If it were my choice I would never have had anything at all to do with office 365. The idea of having any majority of internal content on a 3rd party server with 3rd party authentication means that when the thousands of holes in Office 365 are eventually found, all of that content is going to be unprotectable, and extraordinarily vulnerable.
When that happens, IT is going to move away from "the wondrous cloud" and Microsoft in scope not seen so far. It might be an existential moment. I hope so. I was really really done with Microsoft when they forced upgrades to their crappy next-gen OS when everything i had worked fine. If I like what I have, and they take it away, then I feel it as a loss, not a benefit.
I'm hoping that a good solid leap in _______ with some open version of an office, can make a real software company like Amazon, Apple, or Google, fully supplant both their OS and their productivity lines. That would be cool, if only apple could figure out how to stop peeing on its own shoes and make some decent slight hops.
When you can use Google docs, LibreOffice, etc? Seems silly.
The business one has more than 120 M accounts and growing.
Seriously? *That* was the reason you stopped subscribing? Meanwhile, in the real world this isn't the reason.
on a monthly fee for software. It was only a matter of time before the bean counters took notice and started demanding budget cuts.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Microsoft Reports New Subscribers For Office 365 Plunged 62%
TFS states:
In the last three months of 2016, Microsoft added just 900,000 new subscriptions -- and throughout all of 2016, subscriptions increased by just 4.3 million.
So the number of new subscribers isn't as big a number, but it's still increased by 900K in the last quarter of 2016. Perhaps they're hitting saturation for companies who aren't simply purchases Office outright. But they're still getting $7/ month from all of those who have already signed up for it. If they were losing 900K subscribers in a quarter, that would be troublesome for Microsoft. The only problem is the one that is perceived by investors
And MS-Office fiddling with UI constantly, with the ribbon interface, then menu items rearranging themselves based on use etc confused lots of users of advanced features.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... if I ever needed ultimate MS Office compatibility, I'd probably re-install an older copy of MS Office I have, However, at this point, LibreOffice opens and works well with the MS Office file that friends and colleagues send to me. So why should I pay $7 per month for the cloud version of MS Office when the free-as-in-beer LibreOffice works for me. I'd rather use that $7 per month for Netflix streaming....
Office 365 is a bug-ridden collection of bloat code that can't even reliably create "down-graded" files compatible with Office 2003. No wonder LibreOffice is eating into their market share.
Those elusive unicorns mustn't be too interested in Office 365 subscriptions.
Seriously? *That* was the reason you stopped subscribing? Meanwhile, in the real world this isn't the reason.
Yes, that was one of the major reasons. I put my Arq backups there.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people do different things for different reasons.
-$10 a month to use Office. Wouldn't you? I mean, sure it's not as good as Open office, or... Well it sucks, but they aren't willing to pay me to use those products, they just expect me to use them for free. If MS wants me to use Office, I'm willing, for a mere $10 a month, for $50 a month I'll actually *use* it, not just pretend to use it and install it on my computer!
A office 365 subscrption with umlimited one drive storage is a lot cheaper than a subcription for dropbox and the like. So I would say it was a big reason pushing people over the edge to get a office 365 subscription.
because they only added nearly a million new users this year and only make half a billion dollars a year from it? I wish my own failures were that profitable.
that is until the full cost kicks in. people don't stay in jobs but their data does...@ full price per month....none of the idiot cloud options have inactive user accounts @ 0.50 per month or similar...one of the things that put us off. google, zoho, ms etc etc
Office is a cluster. Is the click-to-run 2016 version, or the stand alone installer of 365? Oh, it's the msi-installed version of 2013, well then you can't run skype. You have to run lync basic 2016, stand alone installer version - which is visually/functionally the same thing, except it takes a small miracle to find the installer anywhere. And don't forget to create an office-portal account to activate your software, because using a key is so 2010.
In any scenario except a single person, buying office for themself, to put on their own computer, it's a pure headache.
How about fixing it so it doesn't truncate leading zeros? What a piece of crap.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I have almost entirely switched to Google docs. It does very little (which is all I need) and it does that very little very well. On occasion I have to open a word or excel doc and use 365 that was installed on my machine by IT. Every time it is a slog through stupid functions to get to the thing I need. Make a table, not right there. Formatting gone nuts again, oh well, CTRL-Z until I can try again. And so on
Or I can use Google docs and at no point does it get in my way. I don't lose things, I don't forget things, it just works.
When I was on Mac I used a document editor called Bean. Simply perfect. If it couldn't do it then I didn't want to do it, or I had a proper tool like Illustrator or InDesign.
I think the newest versions of Word are a classic example of a company listening to the "experts" who aren't the typical user. I am not suggesting that the experts be ignored, but that there be a basic simple editor for people like me who have a deep and unrelenting hatred of this ribbon crap, and an advanced editor for all those middle managers who love to generate TPS reports. There is probably even a cover-sheet versioning system.
I use google docs. I do this through my browser. When I am not using google docs. It is not running on my computer. 365 starts out on most machines as bloatware that comes with the OS. Actually installing this slow pile of crap makes the computer waste time and energy when I am not using the software.
How about this Microsoft? When I am not using your pile of shit, how about not running that pile of shit 100 different ways in the background? I maybe use 365 once a month. Thus it should run.... let's all say it together..... once a month. Not all bloody month.
And here I am throwing up middle fingers to you haters as my stock sits at an all time high.
I converted all my documents over to open office until the great calamity.. .then I converted them over to libreoffice (bunch of minor issues).
I have microsoft office full corporate on a dvd which I got for $20. I don't even install it. I don't need it.
Powerpoint is more robust. I've hated word since it went to ribbons. I eventually relearned everything (tho some features literally took close to a year) but it was a toxic experience.
Before that, I had some complex long word documents which were crashing on print or crashing on load. I fixed them by loading them into Open office and then resaving them as word. It was pretty clear from the ghost outlines around areas that word had areas overlapping in a funky way that was causing the print crashes. Never knew why other crashed on load but was able to 'recover'/fix them with open office and then reload back in word. They looked unchanged but no longer crashed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Last week I got a mail "Hi, this is clutter. I'm poring through your mailbox and cleaning it up. Please give me feedback at URL so-and-so."
Feedback I gave them. They better keep their grubby dirty fingers out of *MY* mailbox. What the fuck ever happened to knocking at a door before entering? I really felt physical at the moment, like punching some M$ salesman in the face.
Back to $TOPIC: I'm a 365 user because MY EMPLOYER FORCES ME TO. I try to restrict the use as much as I can, though. I learnt to get my mails over some standard protocol and to archive them myself.
If before this time (I had to use Microsoft things for work reasons) my opinion on Microsoft was at -1000, it's now at about -9000.
So much for declining use of '365: HEY, MICROSOFT: I'M USING YOUR PRODUCT BECAUSE I'M FORCED TO!
The subscriber system works for Microsoft but for many who bought a Office version and installed it on a device and used it for many years. They probably feel a subscription based Office is over priced. I have not talked to many who haven't been frustrated, disappointed, or just given up on Office 365. It's another bad choice by Microsoft to push subscriber based software onto people who said they didn't want it in the first place. This result then was predictable.
Maybe if more people paid attention, and more businesspeople did things supporting their long term customers like you, we wouldn't be in such a decline worldwide as a lot of the populace tries grabbing hand over fist for more a share of the pie, rather than try and see how they can support their fellow businesses, customers, etc so we'll all benefit in the end.
I sure wouldn't subscribe if it was for personal use. Though the only time I ever did buy office for personal use I was a student, and got a hefty discount.
In my workplace, we have a small amount of people who need any features that aren't available in Office 2010. So we don't update until they need it. And they're content with what they have, and what they understand. The rest are content with google docs.
Probably they are finding that they use office far less than they thought and that is mostly useless... :D
having the free libreoffice installed can replace any MS office usage without any subscription and outlook is just a pile of sh*t compared with all other email clients
without office and outlook, exchange and sharepoint are also big pile of sh*t
without any of those... why people still use windows?
Higuita
Sounds like you were either one of those abusers if the 1TB cap didn't affect your why would you switch out of principle? Lol.
Also if you need more you can get it off you have 5 E3 licenses you get 5TB per user and you can get more for free you just have to call Microsoft it is unlimited I'm sure when you call they just verify you aren't uploading 5TB of your porn but hey if you have 10TB of business material you'll get that for free
Universities and large organisations are pressured to subscribe even for their students/employees to be able to download the traditional MS Office package.
So it is quite logical to say the number are highly inflated, and do not correspond to actual users using the cloud services.
Smoke and mirrors...
"...that one weak area of MS-Office" ... only one?
Dude, I can tell you 5 fresh ones every hour.
I now reluctantly work with the MSOffice tools for a living, and given the finances behind the company, WORD, VISIO, POWERPOINT and EXCEL are fucking pathetic. Inconsistent. Rigid. Broken dialogues. Misplaced commands. Hidden functionality. Undocumented "features".
The established FACT that free open alternatives are almost completely adequate to replace the MS suite is a total condemnation of MS ability to deliver anything that a user really needs, let alone what he wants.
I've written loads of macros to overcome MS WORD shortcomings, just to provide basic functionality already available in Apple and O/S competing products for years.
With all that money in the bank? Fucking pathetic...
Purchased software is indeed an asset. In the US, the expense is taken over three years. That is, if you spend $300 buying some software, you pretend that you spent $100/year for three years. This is because at the end of a year yes you already spent $300, but you still have software that's worth $200.
IRS Publication 946
Microsoft is still getting more and more subscribers. Office365 is growing, not declining. It is just not growing as fast.
In mathematical terms, we are talking about the _third_ derivative being negative (the function being the money in the bank). For some reason, in the financial world, things aren't good unless you have an exponential growth. And to make sure the growth is unsustainable, it also has to be faster than any kind of inflation.
You bring up some interesting points.
Some customers were very clear that they felt like $59/month was a better / lower price than $149 or $189 to purchase. It wasn't about support, it was purely short-term thinking in those cases.
Support costs became an issue for us, for the company, because we still had to provide some support for sales we had made years ago. The longer we stayed in business, the higher our costs went, even if sales didn't increase. We cured that with a two step solution. First, we began offering extended support for $99/year after the first year. The first year was included in the purchase price, after that it was optional. That gave out customers the freedom to make a one-time purchase, or to choose multi-year support, at their option. For us, it means today we're not responsible for providing support indefinitely in sales from five years ago. For a couple of months it was an opt-in option you could add, then we switched it to opt-out, with support included by default. Then we changed the language to call it "Standard: with support and Barebones: no support after 12 months".
As it turned out, with the extended support option, most of the people who demanded a lot of support were people who had chosen the discounted "no support" option. Customers got upset when we told them "you actively chose the unsupported version. Would you like to sign up for support now, 12 months for $99?" I'd prefer to give customers choices, but not if it makes them angry. We moved to $99 / year support as the only option and stopped offering a choice for only 12 months initial support.
If I ever do something like that again, an annual fee will be mandatory, unless it's a $1 app that obviously doesn't include much support.
No shit they plunged. Who wants to spend an infinite amount of money for a piece of software they will never fully own, when they can just drop a hundred bucks for a version that's a few years old and theirs forever. No wallet sapping. No bullshit.
Most people can make do with just about any kind of office product be it MS Office, Libreoffice, Kingsoft, Google Docs, etc. MS is just going along with the rest with a subscription (happening at a lot of companies like Adobe, etc.) Problem is- people are used to the perpetual license (I've reinstalled Office on more comps than I can count) and don't *need* the latest edition. So they'll simply keep buying the perpetual or migrate to another (most likely free) platform.
Google's cloud services comply with many industry audit standards:
https://cloud.google.com/secur...
Google also has many large security teams looking for zero day vulnerabilities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is the stuff we know about - I'm sure there are a ton of security initiatives inside Google that we outsiders know nothing about.
It's hard to imagine an SMB network that equals Google's commitment to security and compliance. I would trust Google over the server farm stuffed in a closet in your average SMB.
Our school moved to Google Apps and Chrome OS about 3 years ago. Microsoft, at the time, did not have a comprehensive cloud/local strategy that could compete with the ease of use and cost (free) of Google Apps.
Recently Microsoft has started giving away Office 365 with a local installed copy of Office for education customers. That's nice, but we are very entrenched in the Google Apps/Chrome OS ecosystem - so switching back at this point would cause lots of pain for little benefit.
So in a period of 3 years we went from buying Office licenses for our all of our students and staff, to a totally free solution. I'm sure many other schools did the same.
Stop clogging my intertubes wif lame video gaymez, video, and klowd. ktks.
It sounds like you were abusing the feature if you were putting backups on OneDrive...
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
Each year, Congress passed a law extending Section 179 to half a million dollars. So if your business has total asset purchases under $500,000, you can expense it rather than depreciate it. If total expenses are higher, you may be able to expense *some* of it. Details here:
http://www.section179.org/stim...
Btw you mentioned "Obama's stimulus", it was actually passed under Bush, and continued under Obama.
The full Office suite is overkill for most users needs. The occasional person uses advance macros, programability, but by far they have always been used to edit simple / small documents.. Those users have so many other options now, and likely are using some tablet, phone or web based option.
It sounds like you were abusing the feature if you were putting backups on OneDrive...
No, people putting well over 20TB on the drive were abusing it. I was under 3TB.
But hey, nice jumping to conclusions.
Trust the Cloud, the cloud is your
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...give others an excuse to doubly sabotage me by affecting the bank account and the subscription paid with it. Microsoft can calculate the amounts for a fair time before the software needs to be repurchased, and finance the lump sums to get their monthly payment from another account as if it was a client subscribed. I switched to 7z because after buying WinZip four times AND losing to hackers the account I used to pay the software, I was not willing to pay it again. And I did well, I may have just lost some other paid software to robbery. One lump payments and eternal re-download is OK and REAL.
Pick up an office 365 subscription? Excel for example, it's a castrated version. Doesn't work worth a damn. Why even use it?
Whoever wrote this needs to learn what office 365 is. Office 365 is not just office products. It can be email, phone system, sharepoint, one drive, teams, power bi and other shit. So calling office o365 is stupid.