That's what MS is moving towards - an annual licence fee per product, not a one-off purchase.

They are probably running out of enhancements/improvements to all of them that are big enough to persuade people to upgrade. So no subscriptions, no sales, no profits.

Corporate greed.

In reply to a post by wingco1:

No idea. Can anyone explain what the subscriptions are for?

It allows you to use office as long as you subscribe, the advantage and it is the only advantage is that you get the newest version as it is updated. The disadvantage is that for normal use it is expensive and no doubt they want you to store your documents on the cloud, I bet that is the default place to save to.

I moved on from Office 2013 to 2016 recently, if you buy the 'stand alone' version there is no need to subscribe and I believe some upgrades will be given free until 2020.

To be honest, most Office users may use perhaps five or six percent of the features available, I only updated because it cost me nothing, tax deductible for a business (or so my accountant told me lol) so in reality although I run quite complex spreadsheets for the family business I could have easily 'survived' on an earlier version of office.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

LOL. So google taking a click-fee .

I only ever click the first search result in Google that is not tagged "Ad", meaning I visit the first "organic" search result, and Google do not gain click revenue.

I've subscribed to Office 365 but I don't like it, so much so that I'm using Open Office as well. I can't stand the ribbon. If I can get Office 97 working on Windows 7, I'll move back to that in an instant. The software installs well enough and so does SP1, but SP2 refuses to install and without that, Office 97 is not much use to me. Maybe I should get my hands on the last version that didn't use the ribbon - Office 2010, I believe.

Office 2003 - no ribbon - works on Windows 7, it also works on Windows 10, I know someone using it.

The ribbon came in with Office 2007. To be honest, having persevered with it, I find it easy to use. Though occasionally, as I did with the old menu system I still sometimes hunt for an infrequently used feature.

There are 'opened' copies of Office 2003 Pro available on Amazon for £25. I'm wondering what the catch might be. Pirated editions, I suppose.

Edited by micksharpe (Tue 12-Jan-16 23:09:05)

The biggest single benefit of the subscription is the onedrive storage. I use it to back up my raw photos from holidays and the like - £80 a year is pretty cheap for the 50TB of storage I have available (although I use less than a TB but even so it is not a bad price for that level of storage). Essentially I buy the storage and get Office for free.

i don't like the ribbon either, I am using WPS office at the moment, I thought I would give it another go at least they give the choice between the ribbon and normal menus.
The problem with the ribbon is that very few producers are using it, so you go from one bit of software to another and you got to use a different UI.

The only software I have on my computer that use the ribbon apart from Windows 8.1 is as I said WPS and Foxit PDF reader and both of them can use the normal menu,

This is just Ms trying to change standards again, the same thing they tried with Internet Exploder and failed with that.

I do not like this cloudy stuff where these companies want you to stick every online. I prefer local storage. I do use dropbox for a couple of documents, but no one would have any idea what they mean if they grabbed hold of them.