10 ms·

The pricing structure is interesting: Free to view, requires an expensive Office 365 subscription to edit. Seems like they're missing an opportunity to drive a

The pricing structure is interesting: Free to view, requires an expensive Office 365 subscription to edit. Seems like they're missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can't assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that. If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling. Especially since the situation w/r/t mobile looks much better than Google Docs. Edit: My point here is about network effects, not whether the subscription is worth it. Office previously benefited from them, but it's vulnerable as a cloud platform given the free alternatives from Google and even Apple.

sremani 13y ago
For a family of two, we are happily using about 3 subscriptions. You can add a friend or family for the un-used of the 5 subscriptions. Just one mail for invitation and they have it. The simplicity of the sharing the subscriptions made me a believer. There will always be people who will complain about the cost of subscription for both XBL and Office 365, but I think it is reasonably priced at least in the US.
jmspring 13y ago
There is a trend towards the "subscription model". We've seen it with Adobe's suite of apps, Microsoft has done that with Office recently -- Office 365 subscription is access to the native apps during the subscription period as well as access to the online versions -- it has been around awhile.
- alsocasey 13y ago
  It seems a natural consequence of the popular continual-development, release-early-release-often model of software development.
- sytelus 13y ago
  The trend toward subscription model is generally misguided. When you buy software, you are pre-paying the whole amount upfront. Plus your chance of defecting to competitor in near future (aka subscriptio "churn") is almost zero. Plus when you get new product with new features out, customer has a good justification to repeat the whole cycle again. Subscriptions are good for utility type services which are stable, has continuous consumption, has very low margins of profit and has much less competition. Adobe's subscription model is dumb. They are purely thriving on consumer mindshare but these prices are going to start hurting. Adobe's core business is ripe for breaking in.
  - georgemcbay 13y ago
    I think you are vastly underestimating how much effort would be required to create software with similar feature sets to what Adobe's has. I gladly pay them $10 a month for Photoshop and Lightroom and photography for me is just a hobby, not my job. There are free and paid but lower-cost sorta-work-alikes to both of those apps (and I even use them sometimes -- RawTherapee in particularly has some nice features), but nothing I've tried free or otherwise comes close to the overall feature set in those two packages.
  - bobbles 13y ago
    The current office 365 solution for me works out to be about $2 AUD a month per device. Considering no 'upfront' cost that isn't really too bad for me, and I have no problems paying for tools I actually use to get work done. If people want to edit Office documents using non-Office software there are plenty of free alternatives. The fact that Microsoft is the only company able to do this without formatting errors is value that I think is worth the fee.
cobalt 13y ago
I wouldn't exactly call office 365 that expensive. It's $100/4yrs for students (university) and $100/yr for 5 users. That's hardly expensive. (Sure if you live alone it's more expensive, but you could probably just pair up with friends/family to split the cost)
- nobodyshere 13y ago
  But if I'm alone using it, that's not 5 users. That will be $100/yr for 1 user. And that appears to be expensive in general. A cracked version will come with editing capabilities, make no mistake. I'd gladly once pay a fair amount of money for a version with edit and without subscription.
  - webjprgm 13y ago
    A cracked version of an iOS app? You must be jailbroken. Most users are not.
    - nobodyshere 13y ago
      Or just a re-signed ipa file if you have a developer account. I guess there are such solutions out there.
  - pionar 13y ago
    It probably does not save on the device, besides in some sort of caching mechanism.
- alistairSH 13y ago
  $100/year for subscription. OR $139 one-time for Office Home. Sure sounds expensive to me. I'll stick to the Apple office suite for now.
  - Locke1689 13y ago
    Sounds more expensive to me if I had to include Mac version + Windows version + iPad version + iPhone version. Subscription just bundles everything together.
rayiner 13y ago
> Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs Because Google Docs continues to suck?
- chrisdevereux 13y ago
  It does, but if I send someone a link to a Google doc (or, for that matter, an iWork doc), I know that they can edit it and send it back to me. No amount of non-suckiness can overcome that.
  - untog 13y ago
    How often is that a requirement, though? I'd imagine the vast majority of cases are people just looking to send a document, not look for edits.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      And even if they are, how often do you send documents to people looking for edits in a situation where you can't assume that they have access to Word? It's pretty much standard issue.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - larholm 13y ago
    Just as you can do with Office Online, mentioned in this thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482708
Already__Taken 13y ago
I dont see how you could allow editing for free really it's so easy to steal then with the simplest of copy/paste.
- chrisdevereux 13y ago
  Good point, but it should be possible to overcome this for an online document. Free accounts could only be able to edit other people's documents, for example.
mortenjorck 13y ago
Office 365 is downright cheap compared to Adobe's subscription offerings: $600/year or $75/month. Granted, that gives you access to a huge suite of applications. But if you only need, say, three of them, you can subscribe individually, which at $20/app/month, would cost you a mere $720/year! And unlike Office, which is still available as a desktop app without a subscription, Adobe has discontinued its entire non-subscription-based suite.
- chrisBob 13y ago
  Office 365 may be a bargain for some people, but that is much more than I have been sending to MS over the last few years. As a student this will make me start paying more and its looking a lot more like a cell phone bill than a one time purchase.
  - AdamTReineke 13y ago
    Students can get a 4 year subscription for $80. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/university/ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/university/
  - Chronic26 13y ago
    Get a job?
Someone 13y ago
"If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling." 1. How many documents do you never share with anybody else? 2. The same model seems to work fine for Adobe Acrobat. Especially w.r.t #2: if they get the editor on many, and the viewer on a large fraction of devices, this might hurt PDF a bit.
- webjprgm 13y ago
  I generally consider PDF to be a static document, something meant to freeze the current appearance and layout as part of making it a final draft. Would I start to think this way about Word docs? Is that good for MS?
  - Someone 13y ago
    That's what I wonder, too, but I dare not give a definite answer. Microsoft has tried to displace PDF before (with XPS), so I'm sure they will be happy if they could take something away from Adobe. One thing I'm willing to take a stab at: it won't happen overnight or even in a year.
  - codeulike 13y ago
    .doc will never be seen as a static format - there's too many copies of normal Word lying around all over the planet.
Livven 13y ago
Apparently lots of people (still) don't know about it but there have been free browser versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote since 2010. They were recently rebranded from Office Web Apps to Office Online, along with easier access directly from office.com. Here's the relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221 If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisdevereux 13y ago
  I didn't know about it. I retract most of my point!
- mpyne 13y ago
  Facebook will even auto-link Office documents that you send via the Messages interface to the online web viewer (from the "See Full Conversation" pane, that is).
- herokusaki 13y ago
  That office suite looks nice, much like most of Microsoft's web presence. I'm tempted to use it. I can't help but wonder, however, how would you expect Office Online to compare to Google Docs in terms of privacy (including in the long run)?
rlu 13y ago
It's somewhat expensive at first sight for an individual, but it's a pretty phenomenal pricing for a family. Lets you buy 1 "license" and it works on up to 5 Macs/PCs and 5 mobile devices/tablets. 2 parents + 3 kids? Not bad. Not sure what the stance is on doing some "framily" thing where you share it with friends.
- tallanvor 13y ago
  It's not even that bad for many individuals - let's face it, many of us have more than one computer, so being able to install Office on all of them is quite nice. And I have to admit, the SkyDrive, er, OneDrive integration works quite well - I'm able to update documents on one of my computers and then not have to worry at all about getting the latest changes to another computer, my phone, or tablet. And even the 60 Skype minutes has come in handy when I've needed to make international calls. I'm still not a huge fan of applications I'm used to buying once every few years moving to the subscription model, but admittedly there are some positives with what MS has done here.

sremani 13y ago

For a family of two, we are happily using about 3 subscriptions. You can add a friend or family for the un-used of the 5 subscriptions. Just one mail for invitation and they have it. The simplicity of the sharing the subscriptions made me a believer. There will always be people who will complain about the cost of subscription for both XBL and Office 365, but I think it is reasonably priced at least in the US.

jmspring 13y ago

There is a trend towards the "subscription model". We've seen it with Adobe's suite of apps, Microsoft has done that with Office recently -- Office 365 subscription is access to the native apps during the subscription period as well as access to the online versions -- it has been around awhile.

alsocasey 13y ago
It seems a natural consequence of the popular continual-development, release-early-release-often model of software development.
sytelus 13y ago
The trend toward subscription model is generally misguided. When you buy software, you are pre-paying the whole amount upfront. Plus your chance of defecting to competitor in near future (aka subscriptio "churn") is almost zero. Plus when you get new product with new features out, customer has a good justification to repeat the whole cycle again. Subscriptions are good for utility type services which are stable, has continuous consumption, has very low margins of profit and has much less competition. Adobe's subscription model is dumb. They are purely thriving on consumer mindshare but these prices are going to start hurting. Adobe's core business is ripe for breaking in.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  I think you are vastly underestimating how much effort would be required to create software with similar feature sets to what Adobe's has. I gladly pay them $10 a month for Photoshop and Lightroom and photography for me is just a hobby, not my job. There are free and paid but lower-cost sorta-work-alikes to both of those apps (and I even use them sometimes -- RawTherapee in particularly has some nice features), but nothing I've tried free or otherwise comes close to the overall feature set in those two packages.
- bobbles 13y ago
  The current office 365 solution for me works out to be about $2 AUD a month per device. Considering no 'upfront' cost that isn't really too bad for me, and I have no problems paying for tools I actually use to get work done. If people want to edit Office documents using non-Office software there are plenty of free alternatives. The fact that Microsoft is the only company able to do this without formatting errors is value that I think is worth the fee.

cobalt 13y ago

I wouldn't exactly call office 365 that expensive. It's $100/4yrs for students (university) and $100/yr for 5 users. That's hardly expensive. (Sure if you live alone it's more expensive, but you could probably just pair up with friends/family to split the cost)

nobodyshere 13y ago
But if I'm alone using it, that's not 5 users. That will be $100/yr for 1 user. And that appears to be expensive in general. A cracked version will come with editing capabilities, make no mistake. I'd gladly once pay a fair amount of money for a version with edit and without subscription.
- webjprgm 13y ago
  A cracked version of an iOS app? You must be jailbroken. Most users are not.
  - nobodyshere 13y ago
    Or just a re-signed ipa file if you have a developer account. I guess there are such solutions out there.
- pionar 13y ago
  It probably does not save on the device, besides in some sort of caching mechanism.
alistairSH 13y ago
$100/year for subscription. OR $139 one-time for Office Home. Sure sounds expensive to me. I'll stick to the Apple office suite for now.
- Locke1689 13y ago
  Sounds more expensive to me if I had to include Mac version + Windows version + iPad version + iPhone version. Subscription just bundles everything together.

rayiner 13y ago

> Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs Because Google Docs continues to suck?

chrisdevereux 13y ago
It does, but if I send someone a link to a Google doc (or, for that matter, an iWork doc), I know that they can edit it and send it back to me. No amount of non-suckiness can overcome that.
- untog 13y ago
  How often is that a requirement, though? I'd imagine the vast majority of cases are people just looking to send a document, not look for edits.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    And even if they are, how often do you send documents to people looking for edits in a situation where you can't assume that they have access to Word? It's pretty much standard issue.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- larholm 13y ago
  Just as you can do with Office Online, mentioned in this thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482708

Already__Taken 13y ago

I dont see how you could allow editing for free really it's so easy to steal then with the simplest of copy/paste.

chrisdevereux 13y ago
Good point, but it should be possible to overcome this for an online document. Free accounts could only be able to edit other people's documents, for example.

mortenjorck 13y ago

Office 365 is downright cheap compared to Adobe's subscription offerings: $600/year or $75/month. Granted, that gives you access to a huge suite of applications. But if you only need, say, three of them, you can subscribe individually, which at $20/app/month, would cost you a mere $720/year! And unlike Office, which is still available as a desktop app without a subscription, Adobe has discontinued its entire non-subscription-based suite.

chrisBob 13y ago
Office 365 may be a bargain for some people, but that is much more than I have been sending to MS over the last few years. As a student this will make me start paying more and its looking a lot more like a cell phone bill than a one time purchase.
- AdamTReineke 13y ago
  Students can get a 4 year subscription for $80. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/university/ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/university/
- Chronic26 13y ago
  Get a job?

Someone 13y ago

"If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling." 1. How many documents do you never share with anybody else? 2. The same model seems to work fine for Adobe Acrobat. Especially w.r.t #2: if they get the editor on many, and the viewer on a large fraction of devices, this might hurt PDF a bit.

webjprgm 13y ago
I generally consider PDF to be a static document, something meant to freeze the current appearance and layout as part of making it a final draft. Would I start to think this way about Word docs? Is that good for MS?
- Someone 13y ago
  That's what I wonder, too, but I dare not give a definite answer. Microsoft has tried to displace PDF before (with XPS), so I'm sure they will be happy if they could take something away from Adobe. One thing I'm willing to take a stab at: it won't happen overnight or even in a year.
- codeulike 13y ago
  .doc will never be seen as a static format - there's too many copies of normal Word lying around all over the planet.

Livven 13y ago

Apparently lots of people (still) don't know about it but there have been free browser versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote since 2010. They were recently rebranded from Office Web Apps to Office Online, along with easier access directly from office.com. Here's the relevant HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302221 If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
chrisdevereux 13y ago
I didn't know about it. I retract most of my point!
mpyne 13y ago
Facebook will even auto-link Office documents that you send via the Messages interface to the online web viewer (from the "See Full Conversation" pane, that is).
herokusaki 13y ago
That office suite looks nice, much like most of Microsoft's web presence. I'm tempted to use it. I can't help but wonder, however, how would you expect Office Online to compare to Google Docs in terms of privacy (including in the long run)?

rlu 13y ago

It's somewhat expensive at first sight for an individual, but it's a pretty phenomenal pricing for a family. Lets you buy 1 "license" and it works on up to 5 Macs/PCs and 5 mobile devices/tablets. 2 parents + 3 kids? Not bad. Not sure what the stance is on doing some "framily" thing where you share it with friends.

tallanvor 13y ago
It's not even that bad for many individuals - let's face it, many of us have more than one computer, so being able to install Office on all of them is quite nice. And I have to admit, the SkyDrive, er, OneDrive integration works quite well - I'm able to update documents on one of my computers and then not have to worry at all about getting the latest changes to another computer, my phone, or tablet. And even the 60 Skype minutes has come in handy when I've needed to make international calls. I'm still not a huge fan of applications I'm used to buying once every few years moving to the subscription model, but admittedly there are some positives with what MS has done here.