Microsoft pushes software subscriptions on home users—whether they like it or not
Would you pay $99 a year to use Office at home?
Office 2013 is going to be, for most users, a fairly minor evolution of Microsoft's flagship productivity suite, except for one little thing: with Office 2013, Microsoft is pitching Office subscriptions to consumers.
The company has already been courting enterprise users with its Office 365 platform for a little over a year now. There are multiple price tiers, with enterprise users getting some combination of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Web Apps, and the desktop Office suite.
In addition to these enterprise-oriented offerings, the company today unveiled two non-enterprise plans. For $99.99/year, there's Office 365 Home Premium, giving Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access, plus an extra 20 GB of SkyDrive storage (in addition to the 7 GB that you get for free), plus 60 minutes of Skype calls per month. This is licensed on a per-household basis, and one account can be shared by up to 5 users across any mixture of five PCs and Macs.
The other new subscription is the $149.99/year Office 365 Small Business Premium. This adds Lync and InfoPath into the software mix, but changes the cloud services. Instead of SkyDrive and Skype, Small Business Premium users will get a 25 GB mailbox, shared calendaring, 10 GB of shared (company-wide) storage, and another 500 MB of storage per user. This is licensed per user, but that user can install on any combination of PCs and Macs, again up to a total of five systems
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/microsoft-pushes-software-subscriptions-on-home-users-whether-they-like-it-or-not/
Goliath thinks they can kill counterfeiting by making you subscribe like you're buying an anti-virus product. But for most home users who use Office maybe once a month, this is ludicrous.
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