Microsoft has just launched their Office suite as a cloud based internet application and have named it Office 365.
Cloud based services have been around for awhile now, but have been gaining interest and expansion the last few years. Office 365 includes many features such as exchange integration and a complete web based Office suite.
Now you might think it sounds familiar and that’s because it is. Office 365 offers similar web based applications as Google’s Docs. One major difference is that Microsoft wants to charge you for their services. The Office 365 service starts at $6 per user per month!! And goes as high as $27 per user per month!! A bit crazy and greedy in my opinion.
So let’s do some calculations. Currently the cheapest retail priced Office application would be the Office 2010 Home and Student Edition at $119. Office 365 at the lowest price would cost $72 per user per year. We can assume the lifetime of an Office application is 3 years since the last Office was Office 2007. So 3 years of Office 365 will cost $216. And the last time I checked, $216 is way more than $119. At the highest cost, it will come out to $972 per user for the 3 years! And I think that’s a bit too expensive just to type up documents.
Another downside of this is that the charges are per user based. What if your household has 3 kids? That means you have to pay 3 times the amount just for them to do their homework verses one Office suite installation on one computer the can be used by an unlimited amount of users.
Personally I think business and corporations would still prefer a local software based application rather then all cloud based. It just seems more practical and cost effective in the long run. If they want cloud based storage then just go for a service like Dropbox or just stick with Google’s Docs.
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Cool story, bro… Office 365 isn’t Office 2010. It’s hosted email, contacts, calendar, Office 2010 Professional Plus, Office Web Apps and Sharepoint.
Just to type a few documents? For 6 bucks a month, this gives you the value of having an IT Staff to maintain backups on a $3K server and the software that you need every time you want to update.
Come on.. Facts, please.
The difference is the backup and lets just say that your computer gets lifted and you are not backed-up, hmmm, bye, bye documents. Its not the software that is the value here, it’s the documents you create on that software that holds the value….
You mistaken, google also charges for its premium service of google docs. Get your facts straight…
Unfortunately, you’ve got the story rather wrong. Office 365, though available for individuals, is not just Office Web Apps, which are free for everyone – http://explore.live.com/office-web-apps-get-started – with 25 gigs of free storage.
Office 365 has several levels of service, but the common feature is Hosted Exchange email. The small business/professional version, the cheapest plan, includes Office Web Apps. I respectfully recommend that you research the web site you linked in your article and update your post.
First off, Microsoft isn’t targeting the “Home and Student” user of Office 2010 with Office 365 It is targeted at the Enterprise.
Comparing them, is like asking your local lawn & landscape company why they don’t purchase John Deere riding mowers for the 200 sq. foot home lawns they mow all day long.
Please do some research on the products you are comparing (and not very well I might add) before you post this garbage.
I was going to comment, but *everyone* beat me to it. Sweet.
@Everyone – Sorry everyone for the incorrect information. I was reading about it on another site and must of skimmed a bit too fast on it.
All your comments are correct. The pricing are geared towards professional users and there is a free to use web app version.
Once again sorry for the incorrect information in the posting.
@ Jackie,
So does that mean you are going to print a retraction? I got to this from Google Reader, via RSS, as I’m sure many people did. If you admit that the story is essentially incorrect, you should release another RSS feed pointing this out.
Are you kidding me with this story? This is hosted exchange server, document backups, 25 gigs of space in the cloud per user, and share point for 6 bucks a month per user. I currently pay over 200 bucks a month for these services for 7 users in my small business. I’m going to save $150 dollars a month!
This has to be one of the most poorly researched tech stories I have ever seen. You really need to rethink this article. It’s horribly misleading and indicates you don’t understand what the product offers or what it costs businesses to purchase these services separately.
I have to agree with the commenters here…there needs to be a retraction posted. This type of poorly researched article really does a huge disservice to a nice site. Opinion is one thing, but this was just an attempt to take a whack at Microsoft based on skimming another article?
Should we ever trust a review from this site if that’s the basis?
I know T-G is far better than this.