Consumer Office 365 Subscriptions Plunged 62% In 2016

Megalith

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It sounds like anyone who actually wants Office 365 already has it. While Nadella mentioned that numbers continue to rise, the subscription version of Office hasn’t been seeing the same rate of increase as it did in previous years. Speaking as someone who has a subscription, I like the idea of making smaller monthly payments and getting the newest version and latest updates the second they hit—even though the math may not be working in my favor.

Four years after the introduction of Office 365 for consumers, Microsoft last week said subscriptions to the productivity software had reached nearly 25 million. Subscribers, however, were harder to find last year than in 2015, according to the numbers Microsoft reported: Additions to Office 365's rolls were down 62% in 2016 compared to the year before. During an earnings call with Wall Street analysts last week, CEO Satya Nadella touted revenue increases for the Office products aimed at consumers -- which include Office 365 -- and of the latter said that the company had, "continued to see an increase in ... subscriber base."
 
I have office 07 enterprise but use the google suite or open office for better features and it is free.
 
I think it's a great value. For $9.99 a month, 5 users get 1TB of cloud storage and the latest Office suite. My wife, mom and grandparents all share one subscription. I actually buy the 1 year subscription cards when they go on sale at the office supply store, so it works out to $7.50 per month.
 
Some people are saying the state of OpenOffice is so bad the whole project might get shut down. Not enough developers to keep it going.
 
I think it's a great value. For $9.99 a month,

..forever. You forgot that part. It's pay-forever.

I prefer just owning the software and no recurring fees dripping endlessly onto the credit card, because that's why every business has jumped this recurring-fee bandwagon - they're counting on people just forgetting about it.

Drip.. drip.. drip.
 
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I always snag the 1 year personal cards for dirt cheap then do the 1 month premium trick to upgrade them. Office for 5 machines and 1TB One Drive for what usually works out to about 3 bucks a month. No brainer. I use the 1TB One Drive for encrypted personal document backup.
 
Consumer Office 365 Subscriptions Plunged 62% In 2016

Just for those who don't feel like reading the article. The title left out a key word from the original article, "new". As in "new subscriptions."

One implies they've had a complete collapse of their subscription base, the other means they haven't had the same growth rate as prior years (to be expected if they're nearing market capacity where it'll get harder to acquire new subs).

This may not be such an issue as another key metric in SaaS is churn rate. If they aren't losing subscribers at a high rate, they can sustain revenue growth with a smaller number of new subs.
 
MS is discovering the down side to a subscription model. Once all interested customers have a subscription, your growth rate will be zero. Your income will be steady but the only growth will come from subscription price increases.

The harsh reality for MS is most home users can function just fine with WordPad. More advanced folks can use LibreOffice. All of the collaboration features of Office are mostly useless to stand alone home users.

Adobe will likely face a similar problem as soon as most of the suite holdouts switch to subscriptions.
 
I have to support my companies contact "integration" with office 365 software for those that use it. The system has a shitty export with a lack of options. Internet calendars are refreshed only every 4 hours and the contact "links" system is annoying. Even on the desktop side, outlook has gone to shit in terms of options since any version past outlook 2013. They keep dumb-ing it down and taking out options. I understand making it easy for the average user, but don't do so at the expense of power users by taking away options.
 
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Well, I hope they don't retire AOO and if they do, someone else picks it up. Post 2400
What's the point? What would someone else do that the Document Foundation isn't already doing? There were comments that people just Google "open office" because they don't know better.
 
I get mine from my employer. I only use it for work related stuff since that is what the licensing policy says. (Actually, this is the truth as I don't have a need - I'd use Google Docs or similar.)
The cloud storage would be ok with me. I think they need to do something more enticing to attract more people. IDK, $4.99 a month? More cloud storage? I'm not a marketing guy so not sure that would make any difference to most people.
 
Well, I hope they don't retire AOO and if they do, someone else picks it up. Post 2400

Why? Libre Office is the winning fork. I think it would be better to give up on AOO and some of those developers can join the LO team.

With regards to office 365 subscriptions, I have a hard time imagining what a home user would need to do that Libre Office wasn't capable of. I probably don't touch 5% of LO capability.

If you could buy Office Home for $120, I wouldn't mind that that, but $129/year to rent it. Wow. Some people just like burning money for little reason.
 
To me it's a great deal. I already have Office 365 E3 through work but I buy Office 365 Home for $99 a year anyway. Me, the wife, and each of my 2 boys then get 1TB of personal OneDrive storage and that still leaves an extra account. That alone is worth the $99. Then they can also install Office on their PCs and also have latest versions. For a family it's a fantastic deal.
 
Yeah it's just as good if not better. I recently realized I don't need MS office anymore. Last I checked the alternative wasn't very good, but that was years ago.

It depends on what you are doing. I have found for people that just need a dumb spreadsheet it works out ok not using Excel. But start working with files that contain macros and that are more complex and suddenly it isn't really usable. We have tried for a few users on our network to just give them Libre Office. 98% of them we have ended up having to buy Office for as it doesn't work out every well with trying to have some people using Office and some not. Files get corrupted or they just don't have the ability to do everything that is needed. Like with most things, if you are able to fully avoid trying to shove a square peg into a round hole and are able to use round pegs you are fine, but when you are forced to use square pegs you should stick to square holes.

I think it's a great value. For $9.99 a month, 5 users get 1TB of cloud storage and the latest Office suite. My wife, mom and grandparents all share one subscription. I actually buy the 1 year subscription cards when they go on sale at the office supply store, so it works out to $7.50 per month.

Yeah, for people like you it is cheaper than buying all the software outright.

..forever. You forgot that part. It's pay-forever.

I prefer just owning the software and no recurring fees drip-drip-dripping onto a credit card, because that's why every business has jumped this recurring-fee bandwagon - they're counting on people just forgetting about it.

Drip.. drip.. drip.

The problem with your logic is that you are not forced to subscribe to Office 365, you can buy the software if you want but it has a purpose for a group of people. If you aren't one of those people then yes it is fucking pointless for you to subscribe. If you are a home user, Home and Student is $149 (one time) for a single PC install. Or you can spend $70 / year and get Office 365 for a single install along with 1TB of online storage space. Meaning that you will always have the newest version of office without having to spend $150 every few years. Which is pretty much a wash and not really worth it. For $99 / year you get 5 installs of office. That is where the value is as you either pay $745 for 5 home and student licenses or you spend $100 a year and stay up to date. Even if you left it paying every year, you would have to go till year 8 till you have spent more on your subscription than what you would have having bought all 5 copies to start with. On the business side it is more, but it also gives you more. You can do just the office software, or you can upgrade and get a fully hosted email service so that you aren't having to manage an exchange server or chat server. Which for a small business that doesn't fully understand how to set that up and has to pay for IT support, that is an easier way to do it. Or for some it might be cheaper than buying a server and the software if they are small enough even with an IT department. Either way this is meant for people that normally stay 1 or 2 releases behind and want to always have the newest version of software without the upfront cost. Which isn't for everyone, but for those that are in that area it is a savings for them.
 
It depends on what you are doing. I have found for people that just need a dumb spreadsheet it works out ok not using Excel. But start working with files that contain macros and that are more complex and suddenly it isn't really usable. We have tried for a few users on our network to just give them Libre Office. 98% of them we have ended up having to buy Office for as it doesn't work out every well with trying to have some people using Office and some not. Files get corrupted or they just don't have the ability to do everything that is needed. Like with most things, if you are able to fully avoid trying to shove a square peg into a round hole and are able to use round pegs you are fine, but when you are forced to use square pegs you should stick to square holes.

Sure in business you can get challenging spreadsheets, looking at huge data sets.

I see this at work, when dealing with the data outputs of multiple MB generated by thousands of customers, or people feeding debug info into spreadsheets. Really people are using a spreadsheet to avoid building a application that should probably be processing this kind of data.

But yes, Excel handles that better than LO Calc.

But I really can't imagine how a typical home user is going to get anywhere near challenging the capacity of the LO spreadsheet and we are talking about the consumer market
 
But I really can't imagine how a typical home user is going to get anywhere near challenging the capacity of the LO spreadsheet and we are talking about the consumer market

I work at a mega bank, some of the spreadsheets I've seen are mind blowing. I couldn't even pretend what some of them were truly doing. These things are nowhere near what most home users are doing.
 
I paid for Office 2003 years ago when I first got to collage at a deep discount. I have been able to upgrade a few times ('03->'07->'10) to my current version, 2010, through several loop holes Microsoft left and haven't paid a penny for them but still have a legal license. I use Office so infrequently I have no reason to upgrade, even though I could for only $10 through work. Unless I go back to school for an advanced degree, I see no reason to ever upgrade my Office 2010. I don't think I have even touched it, other than to read an occasional document, in 2 years.

Work, on the other hand, is different. I use it constantly for email and spreadsheets, 2013 version. My work PC is owned by the business (technically, leased by Dell) so I don't count that for personal use.
 
There isn't anything I can't do at home with LO that I can do at work with Office 365 but I'm not a heavy user and there is no Active Directory home. That said, M$ Office is way easier to use and recently I've been told I can install Office 365 on 4 personal devices in addition to the instal on my work PC. As I type this I know my old man had a legit office 2k3 (the best office imho). Anyone know if I can use the key legally since that laptop kicked the bucket?
 
OMG I'm shocked. How come people don't pay for a service that can be done with software that's sometimes free? Shocked, I'm telling you!
 
I subscribed a lone time ago, best choice I ever made. Love that I can have all of my work follow me where ever I go and not worry about if office (not a hacked version...) is on a machine I'm about to use.
 
Honestly, Office is now too much of a hassle and intertwined mess to deal with. If you don't need portable workflow you will take one look at it and go... why the hell should I bother with this?

The majority of non-enterprise users don't have even a faint clue how Office works, how it's installed, how the damn Microsoft account works, how their license works, how to reinstall the program, how Outlook used to work let alone how it works now with IMAP email, or what the difference even is between stand alone and Office 365.

When you step back and look at an average user and say "go get Office" most people can't even figure out HOW.

It's a nightmare of complexity that isn't necessary especially if your needs stop with working on local documents or saving your stuff on Dropbox.
 
I don't see the point of Office 365. I'm on 2010, but the truth is I could use 2007 and be just as happy (assuming it's supported). I guess I'm not a power user of Office. I do a little bit with spreadsheets and type up some documents, but there's very little that I use that didn't exist 20 years ago.
 
Libre Office, Google Apps and WPS Office are all excellent alternatives in my opinion.

I use Libre Office for all my work related tasks now without issue. Surely all the people mentioning Open Office really mean Libre Office?! Open Office is literally almost dead and burred.
 
I get the Microsoft Home Use Program. So I got Office 2016 for $10. Not much need for subscriptions if your work has such.
 
That's $120/year.

Most people I know who are using MS office at home have an older version like 2010, 2007 or even 2003. No reason to spend money when what you have still works.

My last Office 365 Home subscription did cost me only 79 euros ($84.5) for 5 licenses for a year. Sure, it was a short time local deal here in Slovakia, but hey, it is $1.4/computer/month.

Also sometimes you cannot stay at older versions. For example when you develop against Word, or Sharepoint, or stuff like that.
 
Does that come with Outlook?

It's the whole Office Suite. Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

I didn't buy them, but I also have the option to buy Visio Professional Plus 2016 and Project Professional Plus 2016. Also $10 each.
 
It's the whole Office Suite. Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

I didn't buy them, but I also have the option to buy Visio Professional Plus 2016 and Project Professional Plus 2016. Also $10 each.

Nice, you're a lucky bugger!
 
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