[robomartin]

As a long time MS customer their pricing strategies and product segmentation still bother the heck out of me. I get it, but I don't. I wish they'd flatten the offering to one OS and one Office suite and be done with it. Here's what's happening with the tablet versions of Office:

    A qualifying Office 365 subscription is required to edit and create documents. 
    Qualifying plans include:

    Office 365 Home     
      $99.99 PER YEAR

    Office 365 Small Business Premium
       $150.00 per user per year

    Office 365 Midsize Business
       $180.00 per user per year

    Office 365 E3 and E4 (Enterprise and Government)
       $264.00 per user per year

    Office 365 Education A3 and A4
       Students: $36.00 per user per year
       Teachers: $72.00 per user per year

    Office 365 Pro Plus     
       $?????

    Office 365 University
       Same as educational license?

Not sure how to think about this. If I had to pay for my Office 2003 and 2007 Office Pro legal licenses every year it'd amount to a large pile of money. I don't have any issues licensing software at all. You could buy a couple of top of the line German cars with the various licenses for engineering and office software we have.

That said, monthly subscriptions I avoid like the plague. Why? All is fine while business is good. When things aren't great subscriptions bleed much-needed capital. If cancelling your subscriptions means taking away such things as Office and email you are screwed and have to take money from some other part of the business to keep them going.

That's why I've always run our own email servers and always purchased licenses of software like Office Pro. We don't have to update the software every year. When things are good --and if it makes sense-- you upgrade. During lean times you have the option to not spend any money on upgrades and still have full usage of your software. Having experienced this a couple of times over the years I don't like the idea of any mission critical service being tied to a monthly per-user licence, it's a bad idea.

Beyond that, I wish MS would stop this nonsense of having so many layers to their products. One Windows and one Office, none of this "Home", "Home Premium", "Pro", "Pro Plus", "Really Really Pro Premium Plus", etc.