The Problem with Microsoft Office (Premium)

I often get advertising masquerading as news in the Google Discovery feed that I read every day on my iPad and phone. And one of the ads/stories I see the most often is how I can buy a “lifetime license” to Microsoft Office for just $39 or whatever low price. I always shake my head and move on, but after seeing such an ad this morning, something occurred to me. Several somethings.

First, in case it’s not obvious, what’s being offered there is what Microsoft calls a “perpetual” license to the desktop Office suite. Which I would imagine is normally the newest version, called Office 2021. This is a one-time purchase—it’s not a monthly or annual subscription like Microsoft 365—but it can only be installed on one PC (or Mac) at a time. And you just get the classic desktop apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and Access in most cases—with no upgrade rights. You’re on that version forever or you can pay full price when a new version comes out. (Full price is anywhere from $150 to $500, depending on the product edition.)

In today’s world of subscription offerings, a perpetual license like this, especially one with so many limits and none of the advantages of Microsoft 365, seems a bit out of touch. But this is done intentionally: Microsoft wants as many customers as possible to subscribe to Microsoft 365 and not just stick with the same tired, never-updated Office version.

And it’s done a good job of making the case. I’ve long argued that Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365), in particular the Family version that serves an incredible 6 users for just $99.99 per year, is a no-brainer. The reason for this is two-fold: the 1 TB of OneDrive storage per user, of course. And access to the Office desktop applications across multiple PCs and devices for each user, not just one PC. If you have a family of three, four, or more people, Microsoft 365 Family is a crazy good value.

But what if you don’t?

I currently do, as it turns out: my wife and I both use Microsoft 365 Family, we have two kids who use it, and my wife’s father is on the subscription too. But this won’t always be the case. And I can suddenly see a future in which maybe a Microsoft 365 subscription, Family or not, is not the no-brainer that it is right now.

The most damning issue, for Microsoft, is that one of the key limitations of the perpetual version of Office—it never gets new features or is upgraded in any way—is in fact a benefit for many users. In my case, I’ll call it a wash, because I do use Microsoft Word every day, all day, and I can’t think of a single new feature that Microsoft has added to this app over many, many years that made much of a difference. Sure, Dark mode support was a nice add … several years ago. And the recently released (still in preview) Simplified Ribbon/toolbar (whatever it’s called) is a nicety. But facts are facts: I’m a professional writer and I possibly use less than 10 percent of Word’s features, and that has never changed. I don’t need (or want) new features.

The thing is, one could make a case for Microsoft 365—again, in particular the Family edition—for only the OneDrive storage. I do use OneDrive for all of my work-related content, and I also use it as a secondary backup for phone-based photos and my entire photo collection. So this is not something I’d want to give up. Unless of course I could get a better deal on storage from a company that I trust just as much as Microsoft.

I’m not sure such a company exists. And Amazon just this past year killed off Amazon Drive, dropping out of contention. But what about Google? For precisely the same $99.99 (per year) price as Microsoft 365 Family, Google One provides 2 TB of storage per user, double the amount that Microsoft offers. Granted, there’s no Family version, so that’s per user. But if I wasn’t subsidizing my kids and father-in-law, something like that might start to make more sense.

Maybe. The problem is that Google doesn’t offer a 1 TB tier for cheaper: the storage allotments are 15 GB (free), 100 GB ($20 per year), 200 GB ($30 per year), and then 2 TB. Perhaps my wife could get by with a lot less. I know I could not.

The thing is, I’m already paying Google extra for storage because I use Google Photos as my primary photo storage/management solution. (I do this through Google Workspace because it’s a commercial account, at a cost of $99.99 per year.) So I would need to factor that in as well.

But let’s get back to Office. When it comes to apps, Microsoft 365 includes many different types of apps. We think of the Office suite as legacy, these desktop apps that run only on Windows and Mac. But there are versions of the core Office apps on iPhone, iPad, and Android, and on the web too. There are more modern full-featured apps like Teams and Loop that run across multiple apps. And then more modern smaller apps that are often web-based only.

Constantly updating the more modern apps makes sense, and if you follow the evolution of Teams, you know that this product receives dozens of functional updates every single month. But updating the legacy apps, especially on the desktop, makes little sense. These are mature, well-understood apps that don’t really require updating, let alone constant updating. Indeed, the audience for these apps would probably view updates as more nuisance than benefit.

Which all makes the traditional Office apps a weird outlier in the broader context of Microsoft 365. They’re a vestigial reminder of the past, a necessary evil because the market for Microsoft 365 would collapse without their inclusion. And yet Microsoft can’t really screw with them, even if it wanted to, and even if its customer base demanded it (which they aren’t). A word processor is a word processor.

What’s further odd about this situation is that Microsoft has resisted allowing Windows users to pay for a cleaner, ad-free experience on that platform, the argument being that putting a price on this amounts to admitting that the default situation is bad if not malicious. But we have to pay for a subscription to get new features in Office and elsewhere in Microsoft 365, plus get the other perks like OneDrive storage. Why not offer Windows with both perpetual and subscription licensing, where only the latter gets new features? Or make a clean version of Windows 11 part of the Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscription?

I’d pay an extra $20 per year for that. In fact, I’d call that a no-brainer.