Will Microsoft launch a consumer Microsoft 365 subscription product?

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 20, 2019
Microsoft, Windows
|
24

Microsoft has put a strong focus on subscriptions in the past couple of years. The company launched Office 365 for consumers, businesses and Enterprises, and Microsoft 365 for businesses and Enterprises.

The two subscription-based products provide customers with access to Office and online storage, and access to Windows and Office respectively. Extras may be available depending on the selected plans.

Microsoft uses various tactics to get customers to switch from a regular version of Office to the subscription-based Office 365.

When Microsoft launched Office 2019, a one-time payment version of Microsoft Office, it made the software Windows 10 exclusive and encouraged customers not to buy Office 2019. The company limits Office 2019 in several ways: Office 2019 won't receive any feature updates, may only be installed on a single device, and the price of some editions was increased as well.

Microsoft 365, a subscription-based product that combined Windows and Office in a single subscription has not been released in a consumer version up until now.  We wanted to know back in 2017 whether you'd pay for a subscription to get Office and Windows in return and most who replied stated that they would not while the decision of some would depend on the price of the subscription.

Microsoft has not announced a consumer version of Microsoft 365 yet but it is almost inevitable that the company will release a plan or even multiple plans for consumers in the near future.

Some Microsoft Office 365 customers noticed recently that the name of the product was changed from Office 365 to Microsoft 365.

Mary Jo Foley asked Microsoft about the change and the company responded that Microsoft did not have any plans to rebrand Office 365 to Microsoft 365 "at this point". Microsoft did not reveal why some customers would see the rebranding happen on their end.

It is possible that the changes were caused by a bug. It seems unlikely that Microsoft would rebrand Office 365 to Microsoft 365 as these are two different products. The rebranding is certainly no confirmation that something is going on but it could very well mean that Microsoft will announce the first consumer subscription bundle during the Surface event in October or Ignite in November.

Closing Words

Microsoft 365 for consumers is the next logical step in Microsoft's quest to turn all one-time payment products into subscription-based products. Consumers pay once for Windows currently and convincing them to switch to a subscription-model would certainly require incentives to make the subscription-based model look more attractive than the one-time payment model.

I think the question is not if but when Microsoft will unveil the consumer Microsoft 365 product.

Now You: How much would you pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription?

Summary
Will Microsoft launch a consumer Microsoft 365 subscription product?
Article Name
Will Microsoft launch a consumer Microsoft 365 subscription product?
Description
Will Microsoft launch a consumer version of the company's Microsoft 365 subscription service that combines Office and Windows?
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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