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Comment by amaks | Hacker News Reader

It's not changing, expensive subscription for editing is the proof. Same greedy corporation which cares about its cash cows.

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Microsoft is a software company, and Office is one of their biggest products. Why would they make it free? While they do give out OneNote for free, it is not a major part of Office. Making Word, excel, and PowerPoint free would hurt them much more than it would help them.

The same reason a friendly drug dealer would offer a first hit free: to get you hooked.

Once you have a bunch of important documents locked up in Office file formats -- which Office is the only app guaranteed to be able to read reliably -- you have a great incentive down the road to start sending money to Microsoft so you can continue to access them.

I believe that's what they're doing, with the "free to view, pay to edit" model.

maybe it should be free to edit, pay to share?

It is because people like me are in the process of switching over to iWork because my on the go platform is an iPad. I am still in the middle of the transition, and this will make me reconsider.

I agree with XDes that corporations like MS should make money. My negative reaction is that I do not like the subscription model for software. Perhaps that's what amaks viscerally reacts to as well.

Subscriptions bleed money from users continually, regardless of how often they use something. Paying for major upgrades only allows the user to upgrade based on whether they need certain features and potentially skip every other update or so if they use the software only lightly.

For example, my personal at-home copy of MS Office is the 2003 version. I use it so rarely that this does not matter, especially with other options available that can view and edit MS Office documents.

I stopped using VMWare Fusion, for example, because they got into the habit of releasing paid upgrade versions that were required in order to run on Apple's new OS X version. Perhaps it's not their fault that Apple's OS updates broke VMWare's virutalization, but I don't use this often enough at home to want to pay for an upgrade every year. Before I would pay for an upgrade every 2 or 3 years. Now I've switched to VirtualBox at home.

For business use, software is used much more often and it matters a lot more to have it up-to-date. So in that case a yearly subscription might make sense.

Exactly. Microsoft is after the business users who will throw the subscription on expenses without a second thought. Personal use for something like this is likely not a huge market; google docs is good enough, and free, for that.

Microsoft is after the business users who will throw the subscription on expenses without a second thought.

Maybe a few years ago. I'm not sure how many CIOs are still drinking that Kool-Aid today, though.

So corporations aren't supposed to make money from their products? Google docs does not work well on the iPad and I would love something that conforms to the iPad properly.

Is a starting price of $7/mo that egregious? That's around what I pay for my minimal Github account.

If you really use Office every day during the workday, it's worth the money. The $15/m that my company pays per user for our 365 account is well worth the money.

The problem is there are people who don't use as much as $7/mo. Of course, if your company covers it, it is not a big deal.

> It's not changing, expensive subscription for editing is the proof. Same greedy corporation which cares about its cash cows.

I don't understand why that was downvoted. Office 365 is expensive...compared to a one-time purchase you own forever. I don't understand why users aren't showing more resistance to subscription-based software (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.)...it's as if people enjoy getting screwed over.

same for Apple or anybody basically, just different cash cows.

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