How Microsoft Will Change How You Work

http://images.askmen.com/entertainme...5064-flash.jpg
A few days ago, Microsoft revealed its newest iteration of its Office suite. While theusual suspects were there -- better Word features, Windows8 tie-ins, etc. -- one thing jumped out at me: the new subscription pricing model.While you can still get Office 2013 as a stand-alone disk installer, it really is meant tobe used as a streamed service that lets users enjoy the synch-y goodness of an office inthe sky. That sounds great, but wait until you hear the catch. More and morecompanies are switching to subscription-based software models, and, not surprisingly,profit is at the heart of it. I recently reviewed Photoshop CS6, and you can get a veryexpensive retail version or pay $20 monthly for the subscription version, dubbed theCreative Cloud. It’s eerily similar to Microsoft’s Office 2013: Pay a monthlyfee and access the software at a reduced cost. In predictable Microsoft fashion, there aremany tiered options for Office 365 -- Home Premium, Small Business Premium, ProPlus,Enterprise -- but the principle is the same. You rent your software, you don’t ownit, and you can’t resell it. Microsoft’s motivation for using thisbusiness model was the same as Adobe’s. It is the solution to a dilemma: How do youget people to upgrade their software when all they do is write or make spreadsheets? TheEnglish language may get another verb occasionally -- I’m looking at you, “sexting”-- but it’s fair to say that your productivity isn’t going to shoot throughthe sky with a new spell check feature. In this economy, upgrading isn’t much of anoption for many. So Microsoft needed to reinvent -- or catch up, if you use Google Docs orDropbox -- word processing to get you to depend on it as a service, not a piece ofsoftware that’s “just fine.” And it will offer you SkyDrive storage as abonus. But, wait, didn’t you say the price is lower? It seemsparadoxical to say Microsoft would let you have the Office 365 suite for a fraction of thecost of a boxed copy, give you cloud storage and make more money doing it. Lowering thebarrier of entry to Office makes sense because the biggest growth is in developing marketslike China, India and Brazil, where the average income is far lower than in North America.Piracy is rampant in those markets, so lower pricing is aimed at someone who might wantlegit software but who’s broke compared to Joe 24-pack. Games are next.It’s already becoming clear from Sony’s Playstation Store and Xbox Live thatthis is where games are headed. More and more publishers are shipping boxed copies ofgames with one-time activation serial numbers so you’ll be steered toward the onlinecopy that can’t be resold. But, unlike Adobe and Microsoft, Sony, EA and their ilkare being greedy by milking you for full retail price for download-only copies. That justcan’t last. While no pricing has been announced for Office 2013 subscriptions,I’m confident from Windows 8’s upgrade price tag that Microsoft won’tmake the same mistake. Whether or not Office 365 will succeed at drawing people to Windows8 tablets is anyone's guess. Continue Reading

http://www.askmen.com/entertainment/guy_gear/microsoft-office-2013.html ]More...[/url]