Microsoft Will Sell Office, Windows as a Bundle (axios.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft announced plans on Monday to start offering Windows 10 and Office together in a single subscription service. Microsoft 365, as the service is known, will also include security and management tools and come in two flavors: one for large enterprises and the other for small-to-medium businesses. The company didn't say how much it will charge for either version of the service.

Comments

Not just no.

[Chas]

HELL FUCKING NO!

I am NOT going to rent my OS from Microsoft. Not now. Not EVER.

Re:Not just no.

[Anonymous Coward]

One too many cups of coffee this morning?

Re:Not just no.

[Anonymous Coward]

HELL FUCKING NO!

I am NOT going to rent my OS from Microsoft. Not now. Not EVER.

Depending on pricing, I could see how Windows as a Service could make sense for businesses. As for you, maybe you should use Linux or Mac. Might be better for your blood pressure.

Re:Not just no.

[Anonymous Coward]

look at that low sid
he's a grognar that probably still writes in perl and doesn't have anything on his gnu/linux system that isn't 100% free
shake that cane at the times, pops

Re:Not just no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux users: the vegans of the computing world.

Re:Not just no.

[RazorSharp]

Linux users: the vegans of the computing world.

Following this analogy, I would compare Windows users to fast food junkies who occasionally sit down for a fancy meal at Big Boy. I guess that would make MacOS users the patrons of gourmet.

These comparisons won't fly around here since they don't involve cars.

Re:Not just no.

[Austerity Empowers]

The problem with this mentality is that, if it were true, Windows would eventually fade away (hurray) and there would be NO platform for computer gaming. I do not think Halo 23 is a good example, but the reason for computer gaming are mods and other customer driven content (not to mention keyboard + mouse, God's one true user interface). Sometimes Linux can do it, sometimes not, depends on what year.

Mac does not offer anything there (yet, maybe ever, who can tell with their secrecy goals).

I agree there is no reason that professional engineers, developers or scientists should ever, ever use Windows for anything. But I'm not sure the world can yet survive in a Mac-only ecosystem.

Re:Not just no.

[thegreatbob]

They can, but how far and how long depends on a number of factors.

Re:Not just no.

[Chas]

However I am not paying month-to-month for it...

The difference is simple, but profound.

Re:Not just no.

[Chris Mattern]

These comparisons won't fly around here since they don't involve cars.

Did someone mention flying cars!?

Re:Not just no.

[Anonymous Coward]

>What is it you do professionally on a mac that can't also be done on Windows?

Use UNIX.

Re:Not just no.

[interkin3tic]

Sounds like no one is suggesting you do that. I'm assuming you're not a large, medium, or small business. The summary and the very slightly longer article make it sound like this isn't for single, personal users.

Which actually sounds like it could be a good thing. The wannacry malware was almost all windows 7. How many of those machines do you think were run by companies who didn't want to spend any money upgrading and instead cut the IT department? Such penny wise and pound foolish companies might be enticed to subscribe instead because cheaper at the moment, then have to upgrade as soon as the next version is offered.

Herd immunity is good, but often times the herd is too stupid to actively choose to immunize themselves, they have to be forced.

Re:Not just no.

[LVSlushdat]

Those of us who use our computers for things besides gaming, find Linux fits perfectly into our lives.. What very few games I rarely find the time to play either run just fine in Wine OR are presented by Steam.. I used/supported MS products for 20 years and when I retired in 2010, I realized I was sick and tired of their stupid antics, and since they've doubled down on stupidity with Windows NSA Edition, I couldn't be happier...

Re:Not just no.

[thegarbz]

So by that logic what you said applies to the entire IT industry.

Re:Not just no.

[Rick Schumann]

Hey there Bob, nice computer you have there, running our Windows 10. Would be a shame if something.. happened to it, now wouldn't it? Oh by the way we're doubling our subscription fee starting next month, just so you know..

..or did that scenario not occur to you? How would it make you feel, if your computer refused to boot one day, instead displaying a message from Miscreant-o-soft, demanding additional payments from you? Pretty shitty, I'd hope. That's what we're fighting against, at all costs. Personally if it was a choice between Miscreant-o-soft and no computer at all, I'd go with no computer. Luckily there's myriad flavors of Linux out there so there's still choice. Otherwise Microsoft is leaning in the direction of not being much better than ransomware authors.

Re: Not just no.

[saloomy]

1: this offering is aimed at businesses which would much rather have subscriptions to their software in order to skip having to shell out tons of money for the next iterative release.

2: almost every other software aimed at professionals works this way now, like Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, and of course every cloud based software.

3: this offering is aimed at businesses who don't buy their OS bundled with their computer, but use some sort of virtualized environment (either on or off premises).

4: At $7/month this software (over a 2 or 3 year time period) is significantly cheaper than buying the license outright and paying for software assurance.

This makes sense for just about any business that plans on keeping their software up to date for their knowledge workers. Obviously if you have a grungy old PC in the back you use to print barcodes that is kept around for a decade and still runs Windows XP, this model may not be for you, buy the license (which you still can do).

Re:Not just no.

[iampiti]

I disagree. With the previous model you made a one time payment and had X years of fixes but you could use that license afterwards.
With the new model either you keep paying every X months or you can't keep using the software (in theory at least).
I'm still running 7, not because I'm cheap or specially attached to old software but because I dislike many things about Windows 10. If I liked it I'd gladly pay the upgrade.

Re:Not just no.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Software is typically licensed, not sold...

It's nominally on permanent loan to you.

Those aren't necessarily the same thing at all. For a long time, your copy of software you bought with a permanent licence was yours. Various software companies tried to limit rights to it through EULAs, copyright tricks, and so on, but at least in some parts of the world the courts have pretty consistently undermined those moves.

So now there is a move in certain parts of the industry, particularly the parts selling expensive business software and selling games, to move away from any pretense of permanent sales and make it quite explicit that you're just renting something on a subscription basis. This is what has a lot of professional and power user types upset, because relying on something that can be changed or even permanently switched off at any time is not a reliable way to run anything, and is why a new generation of tech laws may now have to deal with questions of service longevity, data portability, and so on.

Re:Not just no.

[hey!]

Well, I think it's a bit of a stretch to put all "windows users" into a single group, but I do go on a week long Windows jag every couple of months, just to keep up with what the rest of the world is experiencing. And every time I do I'm astonished that people still put up with it.

Leaving aside the inevitable and clunky upgrade I go through; the whole system is clunky. It's not that it's slow, exactly; that would show up in benchmarks. It's just inconsistent enough you can't really get into a good working rhythm -- and this is on a relatively recent i7 processor with 16GB of RAM doing plain old office and web stuff.

But most of all the fundamental concept of Windows is hopelessly antiquated: it wants to be the switchboard for your digital life. It wants you to use it for the things nearly everyone in the civilized world is using their phone for.

To be fair, the heavier-weight Unix desktops have this problem too. Their whole concept is just wrong: the desktop is a place for getting tasks done, not juggling your life. It's not a place where you want to be interrupted or distracted, and it's especially not something you want to spend a lot of time screwing around with. Windows makes this inherent misconception worse with its relentlessly intrusive paternalism. It's constantly trying to get your attention, to redirect you to Microsoft (or partners') services and products.

Windows (and KDE and Gnome) would be much better if they simply tried to do less; if it just managed the hardware, the screen, and interprocess communication, rather than trying to manage the user. But of course, that's the whole point for Microsoft; its a vantage point from which it can sell to nearly everyone in the world who uses a computer -- or sell those people to other vendors. Google does the same thing, but the architecture of their sales effort is so much slicker it feels less intrusive (although it gets creepy when you start to notice it).

When I set up computers for other people I usually I set them up with XFCE, and not one person has ever asked for news stories or valuable offers to pop up in their start menu, or any of the other Windows 10 bells and whistles. I myself find even XFCE overkill; I use the i3 tiling window manager, which is admittedly clunky, but it a bounded, finite, very small amount of clunkiness. Learning to deal with that modest dose of clunkiness is a small price to pay for a desktop environment that starts instantly, consumes almost no resources, including my attention.

Re:Not just no.

[gnunick]

> Only reason to get a Mac anything is to run OS X. If you're running Ubuntu, you could get a more heavily configured PC for the same money

The machine belongs to my employer. I would never buy a Mac desktop.

I also cleaned OSX off my company-supplied MacBook Pro, and I have to say that with the addition of a decent OS (Ubuntu), it's the nicest laptop I've ever used, and with the best battery life. That said, I probably still wouldn't buy one of those, either...

Re:Not just no.

[Waccoon]

Oh by the way we're doubling our subscription fee starting next month, just so you know.

I wish. At least in that scenario they're telling me ahead of time!

Last time I had a "subscription" was for RealOne a long, long time ago. I had purchased access to watch videos for $25 for one year. Once the subscription was up for renewal, the fee had doubled to $50/yr., but the only way I found out was when I received my VISA statement and saw the new charge. I received no notification about the increase in fee or receipt for the charge. They just doubled the fee on a whim and I never received an e-mail or anything, and had no idea.

When I called Real Inc. to complain about the fee, they told me I only had 10 days from the day of renewal to cancel my subscription. I argued that since I had not been issued a receipt for the charge, and I receive my VISA statement every 30 days, I had no opportunity to dispute the charge within 10 days. It took some stern language with a manager, but I eventually had the fee retracted and my subscription canceled.

I've never had any intention of renting access to content again, let alone renting software.

security

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft will offer security" reads like "the oven will produce ice cubes" or "the ocean will give dry towels".

Makes things simpler

[amalcolm]

Nice ... now I only have one bundle to avoid buying

I still use Office 2010

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use Office 2010. After that version, Microsoft ended the contract that it had with the local company that provided the proofreading tools for Brazilian Portuguese and decided to build a new grammar/style checker from scratch, which as of Word 2016 still is extremely inferior. It has fewer options and misses obvious grammar mistakes. Nevertheless, the LibreOffice checker is even worse.

Re:I still use Office 2010

[Anonymous Coward]

if you find a pattern that libreoffice is failing to catch, please submit a bug report with as much detail as possible. You too can be a valuable contributor to libreOffice. In fact, I don't think we have any native speakers on the team, so support will only come with help from you and people like you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I feel wrong about this

[i_ate_god]

paying a monthly bill to Microsoft for Windows? Feels funky to me. Very funky...

Why the least informative link?

[ET3D]

Here's the announcement at Microsoft. It's for enterprises only, and I think MS previously offered Windows as a sub for them, so bundling Office makes sense.

Re:Why the least informative link?

[ledow]

Schools have had this for nearly a decade now.

Annual subscription, pays for both Windows and Office (EDUDESKTOP), stop paying and both go away.

The only difference is that schools pay per full-time-equivalent staff numbers (e.g. each full-time teaching employee) and then get to install Windows/Office on as much as they like, and remote desktop licences, and Office 365 stuff too.

Unfortunately, complicated by having to have separate annual licences for Server, Exchange, SQL, etc. still. Why they can't just break those out into a server bundle, I can't fathom.

So much for the 90s/2000s competition probe then

[mccalli]

Which recommended explicitly to split MS into two companies - an OS company and an applications company- specifically to stop this kind of bundling from taking place and disadvantaging competitive companies.

Oh well.

That does it for one-off licensing...

[ErichTheRed]

I guess it's been coming for a while. From their perspective it makes total sense - keep everyone on a single version of Windows and Office, force all the consumer users to accept every OS and application update, etc. The average consumer is used to the subscription model now - many are on Office 365 and almost everyone pays for their mobile phone every month. I can't say I'm too happy about the idea of having to rent the operating system as well as the office software running on top of it, but hopefully they'll realize they can't trap everyone in that cycle.

This seems to be the ultimate desired state -- collect revenue on a permanent basis little by little, rather than rely on enterprise agreements and one-off software purchases. It's going to be a big shift though, Windows client licenses have been sold to OEMs for ages, and buying a new computer means it comes pre-licensed for the life of the machine. Windows Server licenses have been either one-off purchases or covered under much bigger enterprise agreements. If you shift to a monthly fee, who pays it, and what happens if you don't pay?

Being in the IT industry for a while gives an interesting perspective...this is officially the point where we start swinging back toward an IBM mainframe style model. IBM still rakes in massive amounts of money by selling companies a mainframe, keeping it fed with parts and software, and charging monthly for the use of computing power. They used to be pretty much the only game in town, and the PC/x86 ecosystem was the break from that. Microsoft's got this going on the Azure side, and now will have another revenue stream on the device side, so we're back to central control of everything. I guess it makes sense because consumers are used to locked-down phones. But, I wonder if as PCs become a niche product for doing actual work rather than consuming entertainment, how many businesses will be happy with having to buy the same software over and over for eternity?

Re:Keep Trying

[TheRaven64]

The flip side of this is that people want a one-time payment but not a one-time purchase. They don't want to just buy Windows, they want to buy Windows and a multi-year supply of security and bug fixes. This seems like a better model to me: it hopefully gives Microsoft a financial incentive to keep versions of Windows that people actually want to use supported, rather than killing them and pushing people to buy new ones if they want security updates.

How long before required on new PCs?

[Danathar]

The real question is going to be, how long before this becomes a requirement on new PC purchases for consumers with Windows pre-loaded? And will consumers cough up the 10 bucks a month or so in addition to the cost of the computer?

IT Manager here

[grasshoppa]

As much as I hate MS and dislike the "subscription" model, it's not really a horrible idea in a corporate environment.

I've been stuck behind budgeting concerns which left XP *still* being installed on a sizable portion of our workstations. I'm not even going to talk about the archaic version of office we're rocking.

For home use; bullshit. For corporate/government, it's got it's appeal.

Re:IT Manager here

[omfglearntoplay]

For our parent company, this subscription would be a very bad model. OS and office "upgrades" are extremely disruptive to our operations groups... Excel version changes are so disruptive we plan everything around that as it directly affects business... millions of dollars at stake. We can never go to a subscription for that reason alone.

Large OS upgrades are not as bad, but are nearly. Any time it changes the interface and people have to relearn how to get around, the workforce complains greatly. And I'm talking about senior workforce... the ones that love to create waves with upper management. We always ease our child companies into these upgrades, so that less senior people get the upgrades first so they can babysit the senior guys, etc.

Subscription would never work here. Apple iPhones are one thing, since they are a toy, but work PCs are never understood well by the masses because they refuse to get comfortable and only use them for work.

Re:Keep Trying

[gfxguy]

Yes, that's true, but shouldn't I expect bug fixes for my one time payment? They sold me a broken product! As far as security goes, I assume we're talking about viruses and trojans; I suppose it's fair to suggest that people pay for additions to their virus and malware protection to account for new threats, but paying for bug fixes has always been a load of BS.

Great

[Opportunist]

Pest AND cholera in a neat package. What more could you ask for?

Bah, go older!

[antdude]

Ha, I was still using Office Pro 2000 SR3 until 10/22/2016 due to a nasty HDD crash. So, I installed new 64-bit Windows 7 HPE SP1 and its Office 2003 Pro SR3. And then, I got a free copy of Office 2007 Pro SR3. I also have LibreOffice just in case. I don't like the newer Office versions too.