Microsoft’s Office 365 Home Premium $119 for 5 installs offer
Microsoft’s Office Suite—featuring Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Publisher, and the amazing Microsoft OneNote—is the most used ‘productivity’ suites on the planet. To put the usage of these Microsoft Office Suite tools into perspective, the number of key-clicks into Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook is an incredible 7,500:1 against Facebook and Twitter combined. So for every one key-click into Facebook and Twitter there are 7,500 key-clicks into Word, Excel, and Outlook.
I was thinking of doing a pie chart to illustrate this but then I realised that the bit of the pie for Facebook and Twitter, which would be 1/7,500th, would be such a tiny sliver that it would not even be visible in the pie—even if I made the pie the full width of my post margins.
Microsoft Office is so ubiquitous that the majority of non-IT computer buyers assume Word, Excel, and all the other tools, just come standard as part of any PC you buy. But they don’t. And up until now getting Microsoft Office onto you new PC, or an existing PC, was a non-trivial cost. You would have been looking at something like $350 per PC; depending on which bundle you purchased. Even then whenever Microsoft made a significant upgrade to the Suite you would have to pay out again to get the upgrades.
Then along came Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium.
For $119 per annum (or $12 per month, if you prefer) you can buy Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium. Even at $119 this is already a bit of a bargain, although you do have to renew it annually.
But it gets better.
You can install Microsoft Office 365 on five PCs. Yep. For that $119 you can fully install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher on five of your PCs.
But it gets better.
Built into this magical license you can use Microsoft Office 365 from any PC anywhere in the world using Microsoft’s new ‘On Demand’ technology. This is not a Web version of Word or Excel. When you do this an actual copy of Word or Excel, or whatever, will temporarily install onto that computer so you can use them. When you finish using whatever Office Suite tool it was you wanted to use and log out from Office 365 on that PC then the tool will uninstall. So it cannot then be used by someone else who might use that computer.
That $119 is looking like pretty good value now.
But it gets better.
For this $119 per year you get all upgrades to Office included. You will never, according to Microsoft at this stage (and they could change their contract at some later stage) have to pay for an upgrade to Office again. It is all in the $119 per year.
Finally, one more thing included in your $119 subscription is 20GB of on line storage in Microsoft’s Skydrive cloud storage so you can access your files from any PC connected to the Internet anywhere in the world.
The downside? There is ALWAYS a downside. The main gotcha is that the Office 365 Home Premium agreement states that you cannot use this packaging of Office for commercial gain. In other words, like the name says, it is for home use and not for business use.
[Image links to Microsoft Home Premium page]
