The future direction of Office and Office 365

Office 365 is a Microsoft cloud subscription service that provides the Microsoft Office suite plus other services like OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage solution, all for a flat monthly fee. It has been around since 2011 when it replaced its Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS, which was aimed at corporate clients.

Office 365 is aimed at any Office user and is a much bigger step toward Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy than BPOS ever was.

There are three non-commercial editions, three small and medium business editions, and several enterprise editions. Each differs slightly in cost, feature set, and the number of devices that can be used per user, to provide the flexibility Microsoft customers need. And each comes with 1TB of personal cloud storage space included, courtesy of Microsoft OneDrive.

I think it’s a better option for any home user or business compared to buying Office software licenses and, barring changes in strategy that can’t be foreseen at this time, it’s the future of how Microsoft will sell most of its products.

Gone is the old model with long development cycles and monolithic software releases (Windows 7, Office 2013) that cost you a lot of changes every few years in upgrade licenses and the work required to update your devices and train staff . and in its place will be the new monthly subscription model with continuous updates and integrated support services.

Although you can choose between the two models right now, it makes sense from Microsoft’s point of view to switch Office to a full subscription model at some point in the future. Any business prefers regular monthly revenue and incremental, manageable changes to their products over big, expensive, risky changes that may or may not generate revenue. Releasing a version of Windows or Office that doesn’t drive increased revenue is money wasted and can lead to reduced revenue, which is even worse.

And it’s also better for us, since we can handle small changes better than big ones. We’re used to incremental software changes thanks to our ubiquitous smartphones and iPads. We can save time and money by improving workmanship and retraining our staff. And, more difficult to measure but still important, the extent to which software changes differ from what we need and want will be smaller and it will be easier to reverse or modify an unpopular change.

Windows 8.1 and the subsequent Windows 8.1 update were big changes to the Windows 8 user interface intended to fix what people didn’t like about Windows 8, and Windows 10 is the final culmination of those changes. Imagine instead that the initial changes were added gradually. Either we will have time to get used to them or Microsoft will have time to move away from them if they are too unpopular. Either way, we both do better.

Being able to run Office apps on iOS or Android gives us more flexibility in our device choices and the length and structure of our workday. I can read and make minor edits to documents on my phone and make more detailed changes on an iPad or Android tablet. Depending on how much of my time I spend creating documents from scratch and how much time I read or slightly modify existing documents, I can be more productive on the go than ever.

Shifting software costs from every few years to every month helps our bottom line as much as it helps Microsoft, especially since we can easily scale our commitments up and down based on staff changes. If someone leaves you stop paying for them, if you get a new staff member you add them to your bill.

I wish all of our business costs could be managed this way.

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