They discount it to sweeten the deal for your company's accounting department, who are almost always 100% suits who want what's familiar and have enough influen

They discount it to sweeten the deal for your company's accounting department, who are almost always 100% suits who want what's familiar and have enough influence over the accounts to be able to get their way. But the reality is that for a 100% single-vendor, integrated system that works well with everything that's already installed in an SMB or larger, there are no competitors for O365. Back when I was doing SMB consulting gigs, I tried to steer a few folks away from it, because I think it's a bad long-term move to rely on too many services from a single vendor, and especially when those are all off-premises services that depend on a lot of working technology between you and the vendor. But, it became clear before long that I was giving bad advice. The clients that ignored me and went with O365 were happier, and when something went wrong, they just shrugged and said, "oh well, Microsoft will fix it soon." Whereas if something went wrong with any other system, it was my fault because I recommended it, even if I couldn't do anything about whatever particular piece was broken. Anyway, point is, every customer that signs up for O365 at any price is going to be a Microsoft customer for a very long time, and I don't see anybody on the horizon that is going to be changing anyone's mind about it.