AppleInsider Staff
Three weeks after Microsoft released Office 365 Home Premium, a subscription-based service that gives Macs, PCs and Windows tablets access to the complete set of Office applications, it was discovered that the Redmond company quietly upped the price of single use Office for Mac copies by as much as 17 percent.
First spotted by Computerworld, the new pricing structure puts the outdated Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 in the same tier as its newer PC counterpart, Office 2013 for Windows. Also deprecated from the Mac version are multi-license bundles, meaning those interested in purchasing can now only install the software on one device at a time.
The publication proposes that the change was designed to spur sales of Microsoft's newest Office 365 suite, the "Home Premium" version of which includes a complete set of Office applications that can be installed on up to five Macs, PCs, and Windows tablets. To access the cloud-based solution, users pay a yearly subscription of $99.99. Student pricing comes in at a substantially cheaper $79.99 for a four-year subscription to Office 365 University.
Microsoft now charges $140 for the single-license Office for Mac Home & Student and $220 for Office for Mac Home & Business, a respective 17 percent and 10 percent price hike from the previous $120 and $200 price points.
As for the now-extinct multi-license packages, the company once offered a three-license bundle of Office for Mac Home & Student for $150 and a two-license set of Office for Mac Home & Business for $250. Using the new pricing scheme, it would cost $420 to buy three separate licenses of Home & Student and $440 for two Home & Business licenses, representing 180 percent and 76 percent increases from the erstwhile bundles, respectively.
While Microsoft and Apple's respective online stores now reflect the higher prices, Office for Mac 2011 can still be found at the older pricing in both single- and multi-license versions from online retailers like Amazon.
Malcolm Owen
Oliver Haslam
Andrew O'Hara
Wesley Hilliard
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
71 Comments
I hold my nose when I'm forced to open my current version (2008?) and I'll never upgrade to another version.
…it was discovered that the Redmond company quietly upped the price of single use Office for Mac copies by as much as 17 percent.
"What're you gonna do about it? Buy iWork?!"
*six months later*
"Sir, they bought iWork."
"…oh."
Perhaps being one step behind all your competitors isn't such a big deal after all. They can simply raise their prices and... well, period.
Apple should make iWork more complete, and functional to compete with Office Suite, which gets buggier with every release. OpenOffice is not a real competitor for MS Office. Best bet for Apple might be to make iWork or Pages and Numbers (and Bento/Filemaker) open source and let developers have at it, so these applications can be made real competitors. Apache has shown such a process can work quite well.
Apple could really put the hammer down if they released new updated versions of Safari and iWork for Mac and Windows. Millions of iDevices... Another MS cash cow that can easily bit the dust.
But Apple isn't doing it... Sometimes they seem so retarded. Oh well, they can't be perfect, right? They could just recruit more programmers and focus even more on software. I want an upgrade cycle of at least 7 years for my 13" Air 2011, software plays a big part. C'mon Apple.