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]

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.