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Microsoft Is Readying a Consumer Microsoft 365 Subscription Bundle (zdnet.com)
Microsoft is working on a new "Microsoft 365 Consumer" bundle that "will be the consumer-focused complement to Microsoft's existing Microsoft 365 subscription bundle for business users," reports ZDNet. From the report: A couple of recent Microsoft job postings mention the consumer subscription bundle, which Microsoft has yet to announce publicly. One job posting for a Product Manager for the "M365 Consumer Subscription" notes: "The Subscription Product Marketing team is a new team being created to build and scale the Microsoft 365 Consumer Subscription." The job description says the product manager for this service will help "identify, build, position and market a great new Microsoft 365 Consumer Subscription."
The job post notes that the team behind Microsoft 365 Consumer oversees the Windows platform, the Microsoft Surface device portfolio, Office 365 consumer plans, Skype, Cortana, Bing search, as well as the Microsoft Education team. If I were betting on what Microsoft 365 Consumer might include, I'd think some variant of Windows 10, Office 365 Home, Skype, Cortana, Bing, Outlook Mobile, Microsoft To-Do and maybe MSN apps and services could figure into the picture. Maybe this subscription will be tied to Surface devices only? Maybe a monthly leasing fee for Surfaces will be part of the bundle itself?
The job post notes that the team behind Microsoft 365 Consumer oversees the Windows platform, the Microsoft Surface device portfolio, Office 365 consumer plans, Skype, Cortana, Bing search, as well as the Microsoft Education team. If I were betting on what Microsoft 365 Consumer might include, I'd think some variant of Windows 10, Office 365 Home, Skype, Cortana, Bing, Outlook Mobile, Microsoft To-Do and maybe MSN apps and services could figure into the picture. Maybe this subscription will be tied to Surface devices only? Maybe a monthly leasing fee for Surfaces will be part of the bundle itself?
Corporations REALLY want to move everyone to a monthly rental model in order to satisfy their CFOs need for predictable quarterly income. This is really the end of personal computing since it will all be tied to the cloud and the Internet. Eventually ISPs will require your device to be one of the approved rental model systems in order to connect to the Internet at all.
'guess I'll be sticking with Windows 7 or some variant of Linux indefinitely if M$ wants to ram a monthly subscription to Win 10 down my raw gullet.
I'm still not sure why they don't just _give_ away their Office product for non-commercial use.
If teach the workforce to use your product, they'll prefer it over the alternatives, and you'll thus naturally dominate the workforce marketplace.
This isn't rocket rocket science, not a natural law type science, it's shitty-fake human emotion type science...
gg Derpmosoft
Computer users a cheap, really fucking cheap. There will always be a class of people who will go with rent-seeking ideas like this but it will be short lived. The majority of people will switch to something free (may be pirated MS Office or LibreOffice) because money is money. They are going to end up cutting ties with most users to profit from the few that go along with it. The few that go along is an eroding base because MS Office will soon no longer be the dominate office suite that everyone knows.
The only way this works is if the product is free for the user and they subject you to ads and steal your personal info even more and even then you have to compete with google's office suite.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There you have it, the official announcement that Windows will be a subscription. Something Microsoft has been trying to accomplish since XP. Don't pay your annual MS tithe and you're the proud owner of a $1200 brick. I just bough a Surface Go to test for the office. Get the one with a big enough drive to support updates (because the 64Gb model runs out of drive space after you patch for a year), add a keyboard, mouse and pen (all extra) plus extended 2yr warrant and it is $1200.
I can't get away from Microsoft fast enough
There.
NEVER going back to Windows now, NEVER. Libre Office/Open Office serve my needs just fine, and no Microsoft bullshit.
Buddy, do you not realize that this goes far beyond Microsoft or computing devices in general? The Rich want everyone to rent or lease everything and own nothing of value. Look for this, you'll see that it's true. Basically another form of feudalism. Discourage and/or prevent average people from owning anything with any real value by placing barriers in their way. When everything is leased or rented, those things can be taken away with little or no notice, and when you're poor, substantial legal representation is out of your reach financially, so you can't fight it. When you can't, for instance, own your own home, you can't build equity in it as you pay off the loan, therefore you can't borrow against that equity, so you're stuck with just your income. The credit rating system is rigged also, so your ability to borrow money is limited. This and other things are what are destorying the middle class in the U.S., leaving a vacuum in it's place, so there's only 'The Poor' and 'The Rich', with no way to cross that gulf because no middle class. Also note how hideously expensive it is to get a college degree, and it's getting harder and harder to get student loans, and even if you can you're struggling to pay them off for years and years -- assuming that is your degree is even worth anything in todays' workplace, which all too often it isn't.
I don't see this being a long term success for Microsoft. Let's take a look at this bundle...
Office - MS would be foolish to not keep this a separate subscription. Besides, kids are coming up with Google Docs and Gmail is a de facto standard, Office can be easily avoided for anyone who wishes to.
Skype - I know some people still use it, but for those users where FaceTime or Hangouts isn't practical, there are a dozen other options for IM and video chat.
Windows - making an OS dependent on a subscription payment to run third party software is going to come back to haunt Microsoft. Even if they avoid spending a ton of time in court, they're going to end up receiving the ire of every third party software vendor who writes for Windows...and even if the thought is that so many people are doing everything in a browser that it doesn't matter, that's an argument for OSX or Chromebooks, and also summarily dismisses lots of VERY expensive line of business software for niche industries...and also most of Adobe's bread and butter. Now, if the argument is "no updates if you don't subscribe", the response from a whole lot of people will be, "do you mean it?!". Microsoft's updates are seen by most as a necessary evil, not something to be anticipated.
Cortana - first off, f'k that b'ch. Second, virtual assistants tend to be associated with mobile devices. People who want one are generally already used to saying "hey Alexa" or "OK Google", and they're already used to not-paying for it.
MSN - has literally anybody, ever, since the release of Mosaic, subscribed to a general purpose search engine? Not AltaVista, not Lycos or Excite, not Dogpile or Duck Duck Go, and certainly not Google.
Hotmail/Outlook.com email - they're a minority player to begin with, folks who are paying for personal mail are likely paying for Yahoo or AOL or something else entirely based on inertia. Convincing users to switch from Gmail or not switch *to* gmail isn't the easiest selling point.
Bonus: the MS Appy App store and its UWP apps aren't adopting well as it is. If they have to tell the developers they have that their audience will suddenly be limited to MS subscribers, that's going to make things even harder on both sides, while making Android development that much safer of a bet.
So really, MS doesn't really offer a product that seems like a candidate for subscription that can't either be readily replaced, except the one that's so entrenched that requiring a subscription would either royally backfire from a user revolt, sell so poorly that it would clearly be a fool's errand, or ultimately dare the courts to step in and start regulating them.
The plan of "Keeping people poor and not letting them own anything" has not, historically, worked out well for the rich. It might work OK-ish for the first generation, but then the subsequent generations become increasingly criminal, depraved, undisciplined, abusive, sadistic and masochistic. Lots of historical precident there of tragedy repeating over and over and things happening we can't have a very unpolite conversation about.
I am very skeptical about the "Rich screwing the poor" by force line due to that; I would assume the rich are very motivated not to have their entire blood line made extinct.
Whilst 'the rich' may appear intelligent, cunning and inventive in their methods to screw the rest of us over in the ways Rick mentioned (and they are screwing all of us exactly as Rick says), they are still too dumb to learn from the basic lessons of history. It's also complacence, they feel so powerful that nothing bad will ever happen. I can't wait for the day history does come around again and bite them in the ass.
Subscriptions actually make more sense for businesses. Automatic updates, lower upfront cost to allow more liquidity towards purchases more directly needed for the business,The ability to cancel services when the product isn't needed...
For Home use though, it is just a suck on our income, with an other monthly bill to make sure you have money in your bank account to pay for. And for a product you may not be using all the time. I would much rather buy a copy of office for a few hundred bucks and let it become a few years out of date, where if my income gets tight I can still have the product at hand.
Luckally LibreOffice is good enough for my home use. And my works Office account allows me to have a copy on my PC as well.
However what I really miss is Photoshop, I really can't justify paying that much for Adobe Subscription for software that is on my PC
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Not only will it cost more in the long run, it's an inferior product because the back end is contacting Microsoft all of the time, slowing it down.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
What home user is going to start paying and budgeting for their monthly Microsoft bill - to pay for their Microsoft Word and Excel? Seriously? We have been giddy happy Debian Linux users for years now and have not missed Microsoft at all, except for the Win7 VM we run to run Desktop Quickbooks - another great natively running application that the developer would like to permanently replace with an inferior subscription product. I'm going to get ahead of the game and switch to GnuCash for 2019 and be done with Quickbooks too before they abandon me altogether (by abandoning their desktop product).