Windows 7 definitely beats Windows 10 from a privacy, simplicity, and UX consistency perspective. I wish MS had backported the kernel improvements and relegated UWP to to third-party apps instead of integrating it everywhere.
I must disagree with you on Office 365 though. It is a marvel. Microsoft has re-engineered compatibility with document, spreadsheet, and presentation formats with a 30 year legacy from scratch, enabled multi-user editing on these formats, and crafted a web experience almost equivalent to desktop. They've really had to innovate to keep up with the advantages of Google Docs, and while they have not matched it from a speed perspective, they're no longer out of the running with consumers. Word and Excel Online are now free with a Microsoft account, and I found them just last week to have a rich selection of templates and had compatibility with Office documents I was sent. Office 365 is also very reasonably priced for it's Family license.
I haven’t been a power user in Office for a while, but yes perhaps I have missed a lot of the innovations you have mentioned above. Cross collaboration is something our company should definitely take more advantage of, although it’s hard to train users due to inertia (so I’m left compiling all the changes as always). I agree with you that their web apps are really good now.
That said, I still find google docs much easier to use for simplicity (and I at least up to Office 2013, I knew and used every feature in Excel PowerPoint Word) - but a lot of that is UX, Windows 10 and O365 I find too “clunky” and a tad slow on some button clicks
Excel Online lacks pivot tables, which I cannot live without. LibreOffice is equally helpless when it comes to them, so I am limited to the proper Office.
Most of us already bought office before in a perpetual license.
I’m not sure but I assume companies also had perpetual licenses of Office, so for them to fork over a consistent stream to Microsoft for O365 just to ensure they have the latest version with all the updates is quite expensive over the long run. But most people think in terms of the sticker cost of 1 year and Office 365 and other subscription apps look cheap in that light.
Making it free for a year on new computers with automatic renewal is an easy way to inflate the subscription numbers. How many people are silently paying for something they don't use and aren't concerned about because it's "only" $10 a month?
Sorry I worded poorly - we don’t like it but we are stuck with it to some degree due to it being always updated (not sure if they even allow personal users now to buy a perpetual license?)
Standalone Office releases are still available though. They're just don't have the bleeding edge updates and collaboration capabilities that O365 does, but it was never built for that anyway.
1. That might have been a good thing back when updates weren't dreaded, because they would rarely if ever add distracting UI elements or take away useful features.
2. If you're a small-scale Office user who's happy not to have the latest and the greatest, and you're happy to update your copy of Office every 5-7 years, then a yearly subscription will not be a good trade-off.
Fair enough. I just have a general aversion to subscriptions, they add up over time! And how many times do we need to repay for Office? I have probably bought it at least 5 times in the last 20 years, but that’s partly on me too for not being organized and transferring licenses over.
Storage imo is a non point since it’s very easy to get free or super cheap storage with a bit of searching.
My girlfriend used Dropbox for her business, I was horrified when I saw how much she was paying each month!
Moved over to google and her needs are covered in the free plan, so that’s a quality 50$ per month saved.
I’m not as rich as I used to be, so have really started to feel the pinch with all these subs, incl office which I don’t have anymore. Before I had the same view as you as it doesn’t feel like a lot. But given we’ve been paying for Office from 1990s onwards, you can see that Microsoft is milking it a fair bit given updates (whilst important, and very important in “enterprise” companies) are not that significant to justify paying for it every year.
IT all depends on your needs. I'm using Libreoffice and Google Drive at home myself, as I'm cheap. But if I was doing more than the occaisional financial spreadsheet, or had lots of writing, or had lots of backups to do my need starts to change. At the end of the day, their success is evidence enough that people heartily agree with their value proposition in light of other offerings.
Windows 7 was the best version and Office before 365 was good too - now they just really milking everyone with subscription payments