Microsoft Says Price Increases Coming For Office 2019 and Windows 10 Enterprise Users (zdnet.com)

Microsoft has price increases in store for some of its Office and Windows customers as of October 1, 2018. From a report: In a July 25 blog post, Microsoft officials acknowledged the coming increases. Office 2019, the next on-premises version of Office clients and servers which Microsoft is currently testing ahead of its launch later this year, will see increases of 10 percent over current on-premises pricing. This price increase is for commercial (business) customers) and will affect Office client, Enterprise Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL and server products, officials said.

Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.

Comments

Office 365

[jwhyche]

Funny. I don't see them jacking up the cost of the subscription service. Its still a good deal but I'm not to happy with them trying to force it on people.

I would be careful Microsoft.

[jellomizer]

Windows isn't as dependent to the institutions as they use to be.

Except for Windows Clients, you can have iOS, Andoid, ChromeOS, Linux, OS X as well that will just Citrix into that App or more often then not the applications are web based so you don't need windows for as much stuff.

Re:I would be careful Microsoft.

[afidel]

File formats aren't the lockin, it's the ecosystem of plugins around Office that keeps it firmly entrenched. I've yet to work in a vertical where a company larger than say 50 employees doesn't have a few plugins that are developed for their industry that hook into Word or Excel or Outlook that are considered essential for users workflows. My current vertical is law and we have nearly a dozen for both Word and Outlook.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel

[kingbilly]

I wish Excel got the same attention as the convoluted licensing models. Have you ever tried to open more than one file at a time in Excel? I have 4 monitors at work which make it easy to have source, destination, and documentation all visible at the same time with most programs. But Excel is autistic.



And have you ever tried to make a quick CSV file? Check out this level of autism:

*Begin saving file*
The selected file type does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets.
Expected warning, though the default in Excel is to create a new workbook with multiple sheets. How arbitrary.
Google Sheets does not have this problem, nor default to more sheets until you need them

Book1.csv may contain features that are not compatible with CSV.
Fair enough, though this delay occurs every single save which means they aren't even trying to see if such features even exist.
Google sheets does not have this problem

Now I am done, so it is time to close Excel and be on my merr...

Do you want to save the changes you made to Book1.csv?
I thought I just saved them? It's not like I hit an export button like in Gimp or Photoshop.

Book1.csv may contain features that are not compatible with CSV.
ARE YOU SERIOUS? The SAME message again?

Re:Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel

[Anonymous Coward]

Excel used to be MDI. At least in W10 and Office 365 it opens in separate windows now. Same process unless you start another Excel process on purpose. I recommend this if one sheet requires extensive calculations or data queries that could lock up the other workbooks.

The CSV thing is annoying. What is worse is that before Excel 2007 the scatter chart was fast and could handle 10s of thousands of rows of data with ease. Now it bogs down trying to redraw all those data points. And the trendline feature is awful if you have more than 1000 datapoints in a series. It got better between 2007 and 2010, but it's still bad compared to 2003 and earlier. I finally just wrote my own charting in .net and VSTO instead of Excel's brain dead charts (which admittedly are for business and marketing types, not really for technical use. A stat program would be better)

Re:Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried to open more than one file at a time in Excel?

A co-worker showed me a trick not so long ago. When you go to open Excel from the Start menu, hold down the shift-key.

You'll open a separate instance of Excel, which will allow you to have a second window. Not sure it would scale to a 3rd or 4th window (likely depends on our RAM).

Being able to have two windows of Excel on two monitors greatly simplifies things. Why they think Excel shouldn't have that is well beyond me.

Re:Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel

[thegarbz]

A co-worker showed me a trick not so long ago. When you go to open Excel from the Start menu, hold down the shift-key.

No need to hold down anything. If you open Excel from the start menu, from the exe file, or by middle clicking the task bar icon it always defaults to a new instance. Its only double clicking a file that defaults to opening in an existing instance.

Why they think Excel shouldn't have that is well beyond me.

Interaction between workbooks is not seamless if they are in separate instances. You can't reference from a workbook in another instance as it is external to the application.

This is great!

[Gravis Zero]

I gotta say, Microsoft has been doing a superb job lately with all their Linux promotion efforts! ;)

You had your chance

[xack]

Imagine back in the 90s you wrote Linux drivers and file converters for OpenOffice/LibreOffice. But no you decided to take the easy route and now your paying the Microsoft tax with added telemetry.

Quit selling us half-baked versions then!

[King_TJ]

Our company uses Office 365 and Microsoft hosted Exchange email. The hosting part isn't so bad, really. Yeah, it gets really expensive when you have a lot of mailboxes -- but it works far better than the 3rd. party Exchange hosting services we used or considered previously. (Many of the remaining Exchange mail hosts are really "legacy" providers who still have enough clients so it doesn't make sense for them to shut down operations yet. But they're typically still using an older version of Exchange server that's not fully compatible with the latest features in Outlook, and won't give you as much flexibility to change things in the admin control panels as Microsoft does on their own service.)

What drives me crazy though is how the Office 2016 for Mac and Windows code-base was so lacking in features. We paid a lot of money to upgrade to it via O365 subscription vs. using our existing Office 2011 for Mac and 2013 for Windows licenses. And it felt like we lost as many features as we gained with it. Until pretty recently, Microsoft didn't even put back features as basic as allowing images to be inserted in headers or footers of Excel documents! They also broke a lot of font format related stuff on the Mac side, because they decided to scrap the old way of using a proprietary font rendering engine that was part of the code in Office 2011 and earlier, in favor of using native OS X font rendering functionality. I think this was a good move, except people's carefully crafted Outlook message signature lines got mangled and needed to be re-worked.

I'm sure we'll pay the asking price and migrate to Office 2019 eventually, since we're pretty committed to the whole Office suite after over 15 years of employees using it for the majority of our corporate documents and messaging. But I'd really like to see Microsoft do better about not subtracting features that used to work in old versions of the software and charging us money to do it!

Re:Quit selling us half-baked versions then!

[DigiShaman]

Mainstream support for Office 2016 ends in October 2020. At that time, all communication for Outlook 2016 will stop working with Hosted Exchange via Office 365.

Office 2019 will only be compatible with Windows 10.

Ergo, for the Wintel environment that relies on Office 365 for hosted Exchange, you **MUST** upgrade to Windows 10 w/ Office 2019 prior to October 2020.

Plan your IT budget accordingly.

Re:micro$oft lol classic

[KiloByte]

Windows 7 is the Best Windows.

2000 was a good deal saner, other than certain security improvements. But, as we know, each other version of Windows is passable: 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, ..., 10. Yes, the lack of Windows 9 is not an accident.

Massive adoption of features we're used to for 30 years on POSIX systems gives quite a bit of hope. All that WSL, virtual desktops, curl, tar, sane terminal, ssh, AF_UNIX sockets, etc suggest it's possible that like they switched from DOS to NT, there might be a kernel switch to Linux soon. So Windows 11 might be... interesting.

Re: Microsoft is a monopoly

[SadOldTechie]

Libreoffice is actually a perfectly good Office tool. It just doesn't have the thousand bells and whistles that most people don't use. Oh, and it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Oh and its ethical. Several goods there and quite enough for me (alt-tab back to Lbreoffice).

Re: Microsoft is a monopoly

[bobbied]

It's been tried before and failed.

The basic problem Linux faces is not really the OS or even Office, but compatibility with other legacy windows programs. Nobody really cares what OS is under the GUI, Linux Office Suits are fully functional but different from M$oft's offerings and if you want/need to run something else, it's a crap shoot with WINE and it's derivatives.

What we actually need is a fully functional Windows environment to run windows programs on Lunix that is 1. easy to configure, 2. Seamless and 3. works with a whole host of current windows applications, 4. Acceptable performance.

SO.... You need the OS, a drop in replacement for Office that can read all the current document formats, AND a windows emulator/execution environment to run applications at near the same performance and functionality. That's a tall order.

Re:Microsoft is a monopoly

[supremebob]

Well... they can always use Ubuntu with LibreOffice instead, which is free... ...although you'll probably find yourself spending so much time cleaning up your documents after converting to from .docx and .xlsx format to .odf's that you'll wish that you just paid the damn license fee. Been there, done that.

Re: Microsoft is a monopoly

[nukenerd]

Libreoffice is actually a perfectly good Office tool.

If that was even remotely true, businesses would save themselves millions of dollars and switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

Ah, the "Businessmen are all-seeing, rational, geniuses" fallacy.

Re: Microsoft is a monopoly

[bobbied]

Why?

Because....If you cannot say you can at least read every nearly M$ Office document out there, your "office replacement" is a non-starter. Trust me.

Also, Even if Office doesn't meet the above requirement, you can bet that M$ will crank up the FUD campaign to beat you down and protect it's market share.

By the way... Just in case you wondered.... I actually LIKE the non-M$ Office offerings better than Office. I find them to be better designed, less cluttered and easier to figure out. The problem is, my wife and kids don't feel the same way and my employer mandates we use Office. Unfortunately this inertia is going to be HARD to overcome, even with the perfect solution that's free of purchase costs. I'm no M$ fanboy, but I do see what's reality here and it's going to be a HUGE uphill slog for any alternate solutions that arise, M$ will see to it...