Malcolm Owen
Microsoft is offering an enhanced form of its Office 365 subscription for consumers, with the new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions adding a number of extra cloud-based features to the online productivity suite to assist with working, security, and communications.
From April 21, consumer customers of Office 365 will be moved to a rebranded version titled Microsoft 365. The service has already been available for enterprise customers since 2017, with today's announcement indicating a shift to bring consumer customers under the same range of services.
Microsoft 365 provides access to a collection of extra tools on top of what is currently offered as part of Office 365. The new elements largely aim to provide AI-based assistance to customers, as well as other extra features.
For writers, Microsoft Editor will tell users how to improve their text by changing grammar and proposing structural changes to sentences. The tool will be available all who have access to a free Microsoft account, accessible via the Office browser extension for Microsoft Edge and soon for Google Chrome, as well as Microsoft's tool suite, though subscribers of Microsoft 365 will benefit from further advanced features.
A similar tool will be provided for presenters, with the PowerPoint Presenter Coach advising users on how to speak clearly. Subscribers will be able to use features that suggest how phrases can be made to be more engaging, along with avoiding sounding monotone in pitch.
Within Excel, Microsoft 365 subscribers will be able to use Money, a function that can import information from bank and credit card accounts into the spreadsheet tool. Money will be able to put spending into categories, which may help users better manage their personal finances.
Extra content will also be provided to subscribers within Office, including 300 new PowerPoint templates, 8,000 images, 300 fonts, 2,800 icons, and a selection of looping videos.
A version of Microsoft Teams made for use by families will be included later in 2020. Featuring a family dashboard, the tool will allow families to communicate with each other and organize tasks.
Family Safety tools will let parents have greater control over their children's online safety, including access to how apps are used, their location history, and websites they visit, among other items. It is also possible to lock down devices and apps if required.
Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 per month, while Microsoft 365 Family is $9.99 for up to six people. Current subscribers of Office 365 Personal and Home will be migrated to Microsoft 365 versions from April 21.
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12 Comments
I presume these are not Mac of iOS offers?
I have no problem with Microsoft trying to bring some of its enterprise/corporate oriented features to home users. They already have a stranglehold on the office productivity market for corporate users so it's only natural that they'd be looking for opportunities to grow in other areas. From my personal experience I think it's going to be a tougher sell than what Microsoft believes it will be, not because Microsoft's tools are lacking in any way, but because so many regular users (non geeks) are a lot more entrenched in the tools they are already using, even when some of these tools are incredibly lacking or downright stupid, at least from a logical geek perspective.
For example, I tried to use Slack as a way to organize and communicate with a group of friends involved in a club with around 100 members. Everyone fully understood the need for something better than what we had been using, like email, messaging, and a community bulletin board to post shared content. From my perspective, and based on the actual needs, Slack was perfect, had near zero admin, was totally free, and private to the group. However, simply getting members to install an app on their devices or getting them to access the Slack group via the web was a huge impediment for many. Slack, while very simple to use for a lot of us, was seen as too intimidating by many. Those who felt intimidated fell back to the old methods like email, huge text lists, and Facebook.
Here's an example of the disconnect between corporate and casual users: Those of us who are serious about personal privacy, security, and integrity avoid Facebook like the plague. As it turns out we are in a tiny minority. In fact, the fact that I state this shows a bias that opens a huge gap between what I feel is a great collaboration tool, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and what the Facebook Faithful feel is a great collaboration tool. This creates friction. Getting a large group of tentative/timid users to overcome friction, no matter how small, is terribly difficult. We used to aim for "low friction" user experiences in the bad old days of Windows user experience nastiness. But the reality today is more like "no friction." If a user has to learn anything new to use your tool, your tool may never even reach the starting gate.
Same experience trying to get the family to use Trello for family tasks. Total disaster. Zero adoption rate. Big shock - not! Families don't live in a Kanban driven world.
Microsoft and many others, including many of us, are still stuck in a "push" model world. Build it and market the crap out of it. The problem is that a lot of consumers have long ago transitioned to the "pull" model. If you build it, and if it is what they are already looking for, they will come. But building what you think is a Field of Dreams and trying to sell it to a bunch of prospective customers who don't give a rat's ass about baseball is going to be a failure for you, regardless of how well groomed your baseball diamond in a cornfield may be.