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.
