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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.)
... 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.
Microsoft is having trouble selling $7-a-month subscriptions to Office 365. In the last three months of 2016, Microsoft added just 900,000 new subscriptions -- and throughout all of 2016, subscriptions increased by just 4.3 million.
That means the market is almost saturated, which is surely good news. This is always the trend with very successful products. Same thing is happening to Apple and its iPhone.
Why buy M$ 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.
I have this package. I bought it b'cos I wanted Office on 3 computers that I have, and didn't want to own 3 separate licenses of the full thing. Another thing I liked was that I could automatically upgrade from Office 2013 to 2016 when it was available - something that couldn't have been done w/ the plain Office 2013.
I also didn't get what you meant by 'total reliance on the cloud'. Office 365 installs on your computer just like normal office: you're not running it remotely on Azure. Also, your documents can be saved on your computer as well: 1TB of cloud backup is there, but you don't have to make that the default where you save. Also, didn't get what you meant by 'reduced functionality' either - I have Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Access. The last you don't get unless you buy the Professional version of the standalone.
*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.
Their anti-spam is decent and they let you host as many domains as you want on their DNS service (google for business limits you to 20 or so) and as many email aliases as you want in the same inbox. I have yet to find a more cost-effective way to deal with a large number of domains and email addresses.
Maybe my situation is unusual because I have tons of domains but to me it's totally worth it to pay a few dollars per month for email and DNS hosting, I don't want to deal with maintenance and support myself.
Their web office suite sucks though, including outlook.
lucm, indeed.
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"
As if any company would change their policies after a few days of downtime.
Many companies run their business on Outlook, Word, and Excel, which is why you see it installed on almost every end-user system. Put another way, shut off the internet and see what happens to the ISP contract after "a few days of downtime".
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!
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.
As someone in Seattle that has suffered at least two-thousand days of downltime with our Internet access, you are wrong.
If you would just lay off the expresso a bit then two hours won't seem quite that long a period of time.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
I work for a contractor inside Microsoft buildings, and they tell us to not access the Internet at work or from home.
If you are using Microsoft products, that is good advice.
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.
What does the lifespan of a PC have to do with the cost of Office?
None of my PCs have ever included a copy of Office. One had a demo of 'Home and Student', and one came with a three-month trial of 365, but that's it.
I don't bother with Office myself, but Office 365 costs less than keeping up with the 'offline' Office releases.
Besides, your math is off. Office 365 is $70/year if you buy it annually. The equivalent standalone product is Office Professional 2016, for $360. So that's FIVE years for the cost of 365 to catch up to standalone Office... and that doesn't include whatever it costs to upgrade to Office 2020 or whatever.
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
Serious question: does it bother you that its email account passwords are limited to 16 characters? Sounds like you manage a SMB for a company (or for yourself), and that seems like a pretty big issue. I would assume hosting it yourself doesn't have this problem (though I don't know the answer to this one).
2,000 days of downtime? Maybe you don't actually *have* internet service. Say, did a guy come around and sell you a cardboard box with the word In-tar-net written on it in crayon?
It's Microsoft Office, you pay for it 356 days of the year, you use it perhaps 50 and half of the time it's down or extremely slow.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
... 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....
for a Linux software house, it's Powerpoint, Web based Email and OpenOffice.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
it doesn't really bother me. I use the built-in MFA in Office 365 and it's decent enough, but for like an extra $2 per month I could use the premium MFA available on Azure, it includes stuff like IP whitelisting. I looked into it but didn't decide yet if it's worth the hassle. Anyways I rotate admin addresses and passwords a lot.
For quite a while I was running my own setup. First on my own machines with a commercial ISP, then colocated, then on AWS, then on a bunch of cheap VPS all over US and Europe doing my own load-balancing and HA. I've tried security and antispam appliances, antispam cloud services, etc. But it was time-consuming, with all the work involved: monitoring, backup (data and config), patching, and all that. And whenever I looked at the logs it just freaked me out to see all those scanners and robots from China and eastern Europe trying to take control of my servers, I always ended up spending countless hours micromanaging firewall rules and ids/ips rules.
Now I buy my domains from AWS (privacy is included, which matters when you have a lot of domains), I host the bulk of my email and DNS on Office365 and some on Google For Business, and I typically use Sendgrid to send "official" emails (newsletters, invoices, password resets, etc). They can deal with Chinese hackers and manage blacklists and keep an eye on SSL exploits, I have other things to do.
lucm, indeed.
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!
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
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.
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.
I would like better detail here.
Were you out for 5 years? Or is it that you had isp problems every day for 5 years? Or is it that you had one day of outage but your company had 2000 employees and you calling it a 2000 day outage?
Even the stupidest of CEO. Wouldn't tolerate not having his email for more than a few hours a day.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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
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...
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.
As someone in Seattle that has suffered at least two-thousand days of downltime with our Internet access, you are wrong.
Unless you're employing some interesting metrics, 2,000 days of downtime equates to years of no service, and thus you are not "suffering".
You or your company have clearly learned to accept paying an ISP for their fantastic ability to deliver the worst service I've ever heard of.
An Office365 subscription lets you download the Windows, Mac, Android and iOS binaries for offline use, as well as providing access to the online versions. Outlook probably isn't much use if you don't have an Internet connection (or, some might argue, if you do), but the rest function just fine when you're disconnected.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
He's in a building with 10,000 people in it. The internet was down for a couple of hours last June, so 2000 person-days of downtime.
The anti-spam feature can be had a-la-carte for $1/user/month for your own domain/your own email servers. It's called Exchange Online Protection.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
As someone in Seattle that has suffered at least two-thousand days of downltime with our Internet access, you are wrong.
So this is the first day you have had internet in the last 5 and half years! What a coincidence! You probably won't be able to read this as your internet is probably down again by now.
It sounds like you were abusing the feature if you were putting backups on OneDrive...
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
Well let's see... I've got 1 TB of OneDrive space, my e-mail with 50GB and 100GB archive, task planning tables, OneNote, decent anti-spam, and PKI certificates to sign my e-mail. For $8.
*Clicks on over to Google Docs to check the price of 1TB -- $9.99*
Well that seems worth it.
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
The interesting thing is, it also is fundamentally a right to steal business information, but businesses still sign up for it. Do they not read the EULAs or do they think they don't apply to business computers. A couple of decades ago I asked the company lawyer why they were willing to accept the EULA, and was told "Just let them try to enforce it in court.". He didn't seem to understand that they wouldn't depend on the court to enforce it, but only to defend them after they took actions based on it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
You can get a 1 TB HD that lasts for years for $50. No monthly fees required.
Paying monthly for disk space is foolish, especially when said provider scans and uses your data.
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?