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

Posted by msmash on from the hit-on-wallet dept.

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.

9 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Office 365 by jwhyche · · Score: 3

    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.

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    I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
  2. I would be careful Microsoft. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:I would be careful Microsoft. by afidel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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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      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel by kingbilly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  5. You had your chance by xack · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Quit selling us half-baked versions then! by King_TJ · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  7. Re: Microsoft is a monopoly by SadOldTechie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).