New interesting Office 365 subscription cover consumer and small business

Dear all,

Yesterday we got some big news related to the new Office suite from Microsoft. Office and the whole server suite reached the RTM (release to manufacturing status). I wrote about it yesterday.

You might think this should already be enough for a day, however, there was a new announcement describing the new Office 365 subscriptions for consumer and small business.

It becomes clear now that Microsoft tries to use the share they have in the household marked to push their cloud offerings a step further. It is interesting to see that they are starting to make a move from a classical “from the shelve” selling model to a new subscription model integrated into Office 365

For just $8.33 per month ($99.99 billed annually) you get an Office 365 Home Premium subscription for up to 5 users. This is really a competitive price if you think that you get:

• The most important Office applications
• You can install the Office Products up to 5 machines. No matter if is a Mac or a PC. And the nice thing is that it can be shared among the 5 users
• You get 20GB SkyDrive storage over the 7GB you already have for free
• 60 minutes of Skype world calling per month for free
• You get constantly upgrades from Microsoft. The release cycle of the products are going to be reduced

Microsoft also announced a new Office 365 subscription for the small business market. The Small Business Premium is designed for companies up to 10 employees. The price of $12.50 per user per month is slightly above the current Office 365 Plan-P offerings of $7.90 per user per month. However, you get for each employee the Office applications. Furthermore, each employee can install the application on up to 5 machines. From the description it seems to me to be an “old” Office 365 P-Plan with Office applications integrated. Also here a very competitive and aggressive pricing.

What is currently not clear is if there will also be changes at the current Office 365 plans (P1 to E4). We will certainly hear more about it in future. I expect some bigger announcements at the SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas in some weeks.

Stay tuned,

Patrick Lamber