The rules have changed... sigh.
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I'm participated in several Office licensing threads over on Spiceworld the last few years. People are continuously upset at the new licensing situation for Office.
i.e. An Office license Key Card can only be installed on one machine, and must be registered with a valid email address.
From what I can see MS is trying to get businesses with more than 10 employees (heck more than 5) to use either Volume Licensing or Office 365 both of which are substantially more expensive than an off the shelve Card Key (Home Office and Business - $169, Office Pro - $289 each from Amazon).
Office Pro Plus from Volume License is north of $500, (with SA it's over $750) and Office 365 Office Pro Plus is $12/month
Assuming you use the product for 36 months before replacing it, Office 365 is $432 but you own nothing at the end.What is your take on all this madness? These are some pretty huge price differences, yeah I know there are some real added benefits to VL or Office 365, but double or more the price?
Thoughts?
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If you really need Office and use it, I see the price as being pretty low. If you don't need it or find these prices high, why not switch to OpenOffice or LibreOffice for free? MS Office is an amazing package that does a ton. For people and companies that need it, it is well worth the money. Too many companies who have no need or reason for it use it, though.
It's just people upset that they 1) are addicted to the product and 2) getting a pretty natural price increase. Why IT people are upset I have no idea, this doesn't impact IT. Businesses who use the software are the ones whose pocketbooks are hit and if they need it, it's a good investment and they shouldn't complain and if they don't need it they shouldn't buy it and shouldn't complain. Not sure what other perspective there is. Software costs increase over time normally and the price of MS Office isn't too bad considering what it is.
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It appears that MS is nudging (with a pretty big stick) for users to accept the subscription model. Personally I think it is better for IT and our users as it will keep their software current. I also like that I won't be seeing as many borrowed copies of Office 2003 on clients computers. I personally added our business to O365 and am very happy with the services and the software. Also I must point out the extra benefits of the subscription model, like ODfB(aka sharepoint). ODfB is now where my OneNote lives.
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It annoys me. I used to buy OEM versions of H&B 2010. They were dead easy to manage and dirt cheap. I then switched to Key Cards but it's a massive pain. It's almost unmanageable, so I've given up.
So I've now switched to O365. Even that's a pain to manage compared with the old retail/OEM versions.
@scottalanmiller I don't call $432 to rent something for 3 years versus $169 to own it forever "a pretty natural price increase". It's a huge price increase.
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Yeah, it does suck. When vendors that still had Office 2010 jacking up their prices it got bad. I'm just doing the VL without SA right now.
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we just purchase open licenses for both windows and office. Roughly $240 for each license and we own them. One master key using network authentication. pretty straight forward for me. I run inventory reports through spiceworks for our true up and there we go.
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$240? What version of Office was that? I'm assuming that didn't include the cost of Windows either.
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@david.wiese said:
we just purchase open licenses for both windows and office. Roughly $240 for each license and we own them. One master key using network authentication. pretty straight forward for me. I run inventory reports through spiceworks for our true up and there we go.
Which Office version?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller I don't call $432 to rent something for 3 years versus $169 to own it forever "a pretty natural price increase". It's a huge price increase.
Those aren't comparable prices. One includes ten installation rights (five stationary, five mobile), the full Pro Plus suite, remote use rights (Office Online Sharepoint Option) and all upgrades plus online storage and promises of new features.
I did a quick search of the first price for Office Pro Plus with SA, which is necessary to get most of the features listed for the $432 to license something for three years, was $790, not $169. I'm sure you can find that somewhere for half that price, but the point is that the price is much higher than people think that it is.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Those aren't comparable prices. One includes ten installation rights (five stationary, five mobile), the full Pro Plus suite, remote use rights (Office Online Sharepoint Option) and all upgrades plus online storage and promises of new features.
This is the problem. People have no way to compare the new pricing model easily to the old model. You understand it, I understand it, but the users and business decision makers have no clue.
It is our job to get them to understand the true comparable costs.
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Very few of the differences are technical, mostly it is just financial. Understanding the time / value of money, understanding total cost, multiple deployments, varying features... those aren't technical things. The IT people easily can provide great insight into if and when multiple deployments will be useful, which features are used today, desired and potentially used tomorrow. But the basic financial picture is really for the financial people to assess. IT traditionally provides little or poor insight into how the financials really work for the company - often because they seldom have any real view into them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Very few of the differences are technical, mostly it is just financial. Understanding the time / value of money, understanding total cost, multiple deployments, varying features... those aren't technical things. The IT people easily can provide great insight into if and when multiple deployments will be useful, which features are used today, desired and potentially used tomorrow. But the basic financial picture is really for the financial people to assess. IT traditionally provides little or poor insight into how the financials really work for the company - often because they seldom have any real view into them.
You are trying to tell me that IT does not know the overall financials and thus cannot make the call. Well, duh. That is not what is being discussed. What is being stated is that there are generally not any financial people other than the head of the accounting department and the owner. Neither of those people will have the first clue about a single thing to assess which solution is better. The IT person has to do that. No, IT will not know the financial details of the company, but the IT person is the one that has to analyze the costs of the solutions and present the reasoning to the owner and accounting person. They will more than likely complain about $864 per user over 6 years instead of a one time $169 Home and Business license for those same 6 years. They will not care about the differences because they do not understand them. IT is the only one capable of making the decision on which solution should be used. IT may be overridden by the powers above, but the powers above can NOT make the decisions without IT.
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Basically this can be distilled into "the owners and CFO don't understand basic business or finance and are confused by their own jobs and IT has to do the work of the CEO / CFO on their behalf because they don't understand basic money."
I get that this is possibly true but it begs a major question - if the IT teams are universally the only ones that understand basic finance and management, why do we stay in IT rather than running businesses of our own - or business that are not IT of our own? Why does IT always appear to have the business answers and the non-IT people always seem to lack them? Is it really that IT is that much better and just do IT because we like it that much or is it just that IT has that impression broadly and the business people really do have a clue about business much of the time? Looking at the world through IT glasses it seems like the business people are often little children playing at business and IT are the adults in the background running nearly everything. But that feels like can't possible really be the case outside of really isolated situations.
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Interesting question!
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And I really do wonder this... do many of us really possess a great proficiency for running businesses (maybe only on the backend side) that we do not leverage? Am I well equipped to start a manufacturing business? A store? A brewery? A payroll processing firm? A small hotel? I've often wondered this and struggled with the perception of "I am making way too many business decisions for companies" with the "why am I not running a business" questions.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@david.wiese said:
we just purchase open licenses for both windows and office. Roughly $240 for each license and we own them. One master key using network authentication. pretty straight forward for me. I run inventory reports through spiceworks for our true up and there we go.
Which Office version?
well with the open license you purchase the license for the latest software that is available but it gives you the ability to install the previous version as well. Currently we are running office 2010 and win 7 pro, however we purchase the licensing for office 2013 and win 8.1
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@JaredBusch
I think one of Scott's early points was that the business owners can and should make the financial decisions - I don't disagree that without the proper documentation they don't understand the differences, but how is that any different than any other non IT decision they make? I'm also guessing that in a lot of those other cases they aren't doing the research on all of the options either, they are leaving that to another department to gather the research and present it to management (with or without their own bias).In our case we need to show those business leaders/owners -The cost for each option (including our time for installing/maintaining/etc), what features each options have, etc.
If you're a business that needs to have users using mobile devices and several workstations - its clear that O365 Pro Plus is the cheapest option, but if your workers work only on one workstation, are never mobile, it might be worth it to the company to purchase the $169 copy and have you spend 4 times as much time maintaining it versus buying the VL version for 5 times the cheaper cost.
This type of decision is purely financial - and one they should easily be able to make once they have all the research in front of them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller I don't call $432 to rent something for 3 years versus $169 to own it forever "a pretty natural price increase". It's a huge price increase.
Those aren't comparable prices. One includes ten installation rights (five stationary, five mobile), the full Pro Plus suite, remote use rights (Office Online Sharepoint Option) and all upgrades plus online storage and promises of new features.
They're comparable if you don't want or need all the additional functionality. If I'm buying a TV package specifically to watch football, the fact that the cable company bundles in 30 extra non-sport channels compared with the satellite company is irrelevant because I only watch football.
On the other issue, Finance Directors are often head of IT and should have an excellent knowledge of it. I also have a strong financial background, despite working in an IT role. So my relationship with my boss (the Finance Director) on IT projects is one of a partnership based on mutual respect and we generally come to decisions jointly (albeit he outranks me so can overrule). I've never thought of it as "I'm IT - you're finance".
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@Carnival-Boy my point was that people who only want Word, for example, shouldn't be looking at Office 365 today because that isn't an offering on that side. It's the people considering Pro Plus VL vs. Pro Plus Subscription.
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OK. sure. It's still a substantial price rise to go from Office 2010 H&B to Office 2013 Standard Volume Licence, and you could install the former on two computers. So my point remains, it's not "a pretty natural price increase", it's the killing of a low-cost product.
