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Comment by chrisdevereux | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

I didn't know about it. I retract most of my point!

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).

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)?

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)

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.

A cracked version of an iOS app? You must be jailbroken. Most users are not.

Or just a re-signed ipa file if you have a developer account. I guess there are such solutions out there.

It probably does not save on the device, besides in some sort of caching mechanism.

$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.

Sounds more expensive to me if I had to include Mac version + Windows version + iPad version + iPhone version.

Subscription just bundles everything together.

It's expensive because it has competition that is charging less. The actual price doesn't matter that much given consumers are free to choose alternatives.

That said, $100/yr is extremely expensive in most countries in the world.

Things are "expensive" because they cost a lot of money, not that because there are cheaper alternatives.

Try telling that to the app market.

It's actually cheaper than that for students - only $80 for a 4 year subscription: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI...

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.

It seems a natural consequence of the popular continual-development, release-early-release-often model of software development.

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.

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.

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.

> Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs

Because Google Docs continues to suck?

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.

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.

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.

Just as you can do with Office Online, mentioned in this thread?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482708

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.

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.

Students can get a 4 year subscription for $80. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/university/

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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?

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.

.doc will never be seen as a static format - there's too many copies of normal Word lying around all over the planet.

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

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.

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