As many of you know, Microsoft will be offering subscription packages for the upcoming Office 13. What’s interesting — and honestly, surprising — is that the company will be smartly leveraging other products in its considerable arsenal to sweeten the offer. Microsoft has announced that Office 365 Home Premium will run $100 a year, while Office 365 Small Business Premium will run $150. These licenses will allow you to run Office on up to five PCs or Macs, with additional use on smartphones and tablets.
Home Premium will include 20GB of SkyDrive cloud storage and 60 monthly minutes of international Skype calling. The 2oGB of storage is on top of the initial 7GB of “free” cloud storage. These service offerings could make the subscription version of Office 365 more useful than buying the software outright. It’s smart and clever packaging. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft is intelligently leveraging modern services like Skype and SkyDrive to sell legacy software. Color me impressed (which is a bright orange, in my mind).
I know that many of you use Office at work, school, and home. Are you interested in a subscription version of Office 13? Are you intrigued by 20GB of cloud storage and 60 minutes of international calling?
I’m going to look up the small business premium to see if they will host Outlook. That could be a big thing. I want to start my own business.
Small Business Premium comes with 25GB of Outlook storage and 10GB of “professional grade” cloud storage.