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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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Microsoft today started selling its Office 365 Personal subscription, a less expensive version of Office 365 that targets individual users. The cloud-based subscription service provides access to online versions of Microsoft's Office productivity suite, online storage in OneDrive and a block of Skype calling minutes.

office-365-personalb.jpeg
The new personal option allows subscribers to connect one PC or Mac desktop computer and one tablet, including the iPad, to the online service. It will cost $69 per year or $6.99 per month. Customers who require more connections can sign up for the Office 365 Home plan, which is geared towards families with support for up to five desktops and five tablets.

The new Office 365 Personal plan is available for purchase at Office365.com. It also is available at Microsoft Stores and through Microsoft's online and retail partners. Microsoft also offers Office 365 business plans, which are priced by the number of users and are designed for real-time, online collaboration using the Office 365 suite.

Article Link: Microsoft Launches 'Office 365 Personal' Plan for One Mac and One iPad at $69/Year
 

Populus

macrumors 601
Aug 24, 2012
4,527
6,545
Spain, Europe
Ok Microsoft. Now give me the chance of purchasing a lifetime license, like in past years...

Because i'd rather pay 99-199 bucks one time, than 69 bucks every mf year.
 

flur

macrumors 68020
Nov 12, 2012
2,371
1,160
And how many weeks until we see the "one tablet only" option for $49 or so?
 

dec.

Suspended
Apr 15, 2012
1,349
765
Toronto
I wonder if that's an intervention because of the massive negative feedback their apps got in the app store due to the subscription pricing :confused:
 

surfingarbo

macrumors regular
Jun 12, 2011
114
294
Remember kids, the $69 plan includes Satya Nadella coming to your house only at Thanksgiving to help with the cooking. Whereas the $99 includes him coming at both Thanksgiving and Christmas.
 

kolax

macrumors G3
Mar 20, 2007
9,181
115
Typical Microsoft with lots of different prices and versions to confuse customers.

I really wish they'd offer a simple one subscription to rule them all at a fair price.
 

HMI

Contributor
May 23, 2012
829
312
Still not happening!

I get a kick out of seeing the icons on my screen, knowing that I'm not locked into any rental service! If nothing else, it is a way to double-check correct document formatting before sending off a document created in iWork.


This is a worse deal than before. For $30/year more, one could use the service on multiple devices for a whole family. Now, it really is just for one person, and for almost the same price.


Not budging!

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Paid less than that for 365 Home for 5 people.

How?
 

2457282

Suspended
Dec 6, 2012
3,327
3,015
Office 365 = 69/year (best case)
Google Docs = free/year
Apple iWorks = free/year

Do they all do the same? No not 100%.

For home, personal, school stuff do they all provide enough functionality to get it done? Yes, absolutely.

For work, if you do pivot tables and VB scripting in Excel will Google or Apple work for you? No way, but you represent only 1% of the user base.

Doing all the calculations, I am very happy with iWorks at home and at work, except for around budget time, I wish I had iWorks.

FREE baby; FREEEEEEE!
 
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Mike MA

macrumors 68020
Sep 21, 2012
2,089
1,811
Germany
Already to many options...either one time payment or free of charge at all. That's what people actually want.
 

DaveBreen

macrumors newbie
Apr 15, 2014
4
6
Seems fair

I think $49 would have been better..but $69 seems reasonable for most folks. Given that office used to cost 2-300 bucks a few years ago...this works out to about the same (at least for me).
 

D.T.

macrumors G4
Sep 15, 2011
11,050
12,460
Vilano Beach, FL

You can score O365 licenses at a decent discount on Amazon, or via an educational purchase.

I’m assuming we’ll see the personal product discounted as well through the same channels, so maybe in the $45-49 range. :)

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FREE baby; FREEEEEEE!

Funny, I just had to revise some _ancient_ Visio diagrams, didn’t want to redo them from scratch and I no longer had an active license.

Downloaded Libre Office, near perfect import, made my changes, exported to HTML and PDF. Done.

... and FREE :D
 

Espeonia

macrumors member
Sep 10, 2013
80
1
If you were to buy every version of Office as a one-time purchase (disregarding the student edition since you won't always be able to do that), it would run $220+ dollars every ~3 years, whereas a continual subscription to Office 365 will be ~$210 every 3 years, plus (presumably) updates.

It does have its benefits.

Already to many options...either one time payment or free of charge at all. That's what people actually want.

It's harder to survive as a company that way. If people one-time purchase, then they might not be a customer again in the future. If it's free, you get no revenue. If it's a subscription, you get money continually.

EDIT: forgot something else; you get 20GB of OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of global Skype calls per month with a subscription. At $7/Month or $70/year, that's even better - comparatively, you'd pay $40 for 20gb on iCloud, and (I think?) $3/month for the skype minutes. That means you're really only paying ~$27/month for the office part. However, I don't know if everyone actually uses the cloud storage/skype minutes for it to be justifiable.
 
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KdParker

macrumors 601
Oct 1, 2010
4,793
998
Everywhere
You can score O365 licenses at a decent discount on Amazon, or via an educational purchase.

I’m assuming we’ll see the personal product discounted as well through the same channels, so maybe in the $45-49 range. :)

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Funny, I just had to revise some _ancient_ Visio diagrams, didn’t want to redo them from scratch and I no longer had an active license.

Downloaded Libre Office, near perfect import, made my changes, exported to HTML and PDF. Done.

... and FREE :D

Exactly. Not aure why I would pay for MS office on a Mac when I can use Libre Office for free.
 

Storto

macrumors newbie
Aug 22, 2011
16
3
Syracuse, NY.
Aristotle, Plato, Microsoft......Morons!

When is Microsoft going to get with the program? Per person registration is far superior and more welcomed then per machine. This will tank. :D Just my two cents.
 

shandyman

Suspended
Apr 24, 2010
6,458
397
Dublin, Ireland
Microsoft Launches 'Office 365 Personal' Plan for One Mac and One iPad at $69...

I pay £8.95 as a one off fee for Office professional, every 2-3 years (depending on when MS release it) and my dad pays £90 for MS home for the same period. Office 365 is useless for us and the huge market of people in the same boat. MS needs to come up with a realistic option for our market for iOS. Until then, they're missing out on probably the bulk of their customers.

We already get free space on onedrive, 20Gb is massively excessive for the average joe. Skype minutes are also something that a lot of people (not all, I know) even care about.
 
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Naimfan

Suspended
Jan 15, 2003
4,669
2,017
I'm firmly in the pay once group.

This subscription stuff offers nothing to me and everything to M$.

No thank you.
 

Stella

macrumors G3
Apr 21, 2003
8,837
6,334
Canada
I wonder if that's an intervention because of the massive negative feedback their apps got in the app store due to the subscription pricing :confused:

No, this plan was announced before iPad version was released.

Anyway, a lot of the comments are from ignorant users who didn't do their research before downloading, or want everything for free, or at 99cents.
 

iSee

macrumors 68040
Oct 25, 2004
3,539
272
Hm... well, that's better than $99 (for individuals).

But it's still massively expensive.
It's too bad because I've heard the iPad apps are great.

But even at $69/year this is a substantial price hike for Office, at least by the way I buy it (Since 2003 I bought two versions for ~$250 total. In that same span of time I would have spent $759 at $69/year, or about $500 more...)

I guess it makes sense if you know you're always going to need the latest version of Office anyway and you assume Microsoft will make frequent useful updates.

But I have to wonder: once a substantial number of people get locked in to a subscription model, doesn't MS's incentive to come out with useful new features go down? They'll no longer have to convince you to buy a new version based on how great it is. (You'll have paird for it already anyway.) They just have to keep from sucking so much that you finally decide to endure the distruption of switching to something else.
 
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