Office features
There is a philosophical divide between those who welcome sub based software and those who want to "own" their product. It is true that you never really own any software legally but it sure feels like you do when YOU install it and YOU decide when to upgrade it or stop using it. I agree that excel in it's full form is the best spreadsheet program par none. I regularly use pivot tables and other features that are lost in many others and could not do without it in the office. We should be wary however when the owner of such a dominant program gets too close to being in a monopolistic position of telling you when your software will stop working or when it needs to be upgraded and how much it will cost. I welcome other less full featured programs especially one's that share the same file format with the more full featured programs. There are more people out there beside "technology illiterate grandmas" who have a need for less full featured programs at a reasonable cost which can be shared across platforms. Microsoft has also neglected apple customers over the years. It was not too long ago that excel was so different on the mac that I could not do many things. Microsoft has been stubborn but has now finally decided to embrace the Apple community by offering a version of office for iPad. For that I commend them. Unfortunately it took a doubling of apple market share over the years plus the recent failure of Microsoft to provide a reasonable tablet to compete with the iPad to get attention. As far as being a nimble innovative company Microsoft is not. I hope that will change going forward because they do make some very good products.The whole sub thing is being overblown. Office Suites have been migrating to the cloud for a while now. Cloud penetration is low but according to Gartner, 60% of Office Suites are expected to be cloud based by 2022.
So you've got the following market forces setting up subs to be the primary monetization model for the Office Suite market:
1 - software is moving to the cloud which monetizes differently since it uses a service model
2 - consumers now own multiple computing devices (PC, phone, tablet, etc) so the whole one $200-400 license for one install on one device is no longer cost effective for many people
Far as I can tell, MS is just positioning itself here for the future.
There's some give and take so if you only own one device and all you need is Word, you probably won't like the sub. But if you have multiple devices, it's a deal. If you need Access or Publisher, it's a deal (that suite used to be $400). If you were planning to purchase cloud space, it's a deal (20G on iCloud = $40, 365 gives you that for free).
I'm also interested in knowing what people who advocate iWork over Office do for a living. I'm an engineer at a company of 10,000 and dumping Office for iWork would immediately stop most of our processes, make it a pain in the ass to share information with contractors and outside parties, and pretty much ensure a net loss in revenue for a period of time that'll last who knows how long. Office is so critical to workflow the company pays for training to teach employees how to use advanced features like VBA. Meanwhile if that last iWork update and FCX shows anything, it's that Apple's software strategy looks to be focused on stripping features to cater to technology illiterate grandmas at the expense of organizations.