Office 2013 and Office 365
I happen to think Office 2013 as presented for the home user is exactly what I have been wanting for years. An annualized cost with support and more frequent updates and no large investment. I love the fact that I can use it in five home machines (I only have three at this point). If I had kids at home or in school, this would be very important. The fact that my wife and I can share our files and yet keep separate areas with backup storage on SkyDrive is great.
Do I think the Office 2013 pricing and terms is smart? Absolutely not! Microsoft will kill Office 2013 if they don't change the terms to at least allow people to move the license to a new, replacement machine.
And the office side? I'm not encouraged by what I see so far. The office/SMB versions that I've checked on so far don't look right. I don't think Microsoft prepared very well for the Business Edition of Office 365. If they will just follow the home version and allow a migration to a new machine and perhaps allow a second copy to be added to a mobile/notebook/tablet machine AND a desktop then they will be OK. Anything else is confusing and counterproductive and will lose business for them. I'm not too excited by what I've seen so far on that front. As a small business, we will just use the home edition license if we have to, just to get by, unless Microsoft changes its mind. Offices should be able to use a license on two machines, laptop and desktop (three if you count mobile) and any business should be able to do this for $99 per year, period. In our small business of 25 PCs in a retail environment, we would probably keep 7 to 8 licenses for our office staff, generating up to $800 per year for Microsoft forever. that's a whole lot more than they got from our upgrade to Office 2007 or anything before it. They would be stupid to do anything else and would probably drive us to use something else, which would also drive to another email solution from Exchange and Office 365 would also be dead and take Exchange with it. If they don't do something simple like this, then Ballmer needs to be fired, quickly!
