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Works out cheaper at first, but they soon add up. But you do get the latest version.
Currently on Adobe Photographer plan and two MS Office free trials. It's an interesting model but they do end up with their claws in you and over the years you could end up handing over many hundreds of quids.
Depends how you view it - I seem to have ended up with a new version of MS Office every 4 years or so for as long as I remember - if you add up the retail price of each version for business use then renting might actually have been cheaper?
Full Adobe Creative Cloud suite - bargain IMO.
MS Office makes sense as it's online storage with free office suite included.
The 1Tb of space for 5 accounts was pretty much the cheapest storage when I subscribed a couple of years ago, the software was just an added extra.
That's about the only one.
Add in the 1 TB of cloud storage, free upgrades and 5 installs of office you can give to friends and family and the MS Office one works out really good value, imho. I pay 99€/year I think. I think they basically do it because until recently no home users paid them anything (directly), they either got what they needed OEM when they bought the PC and stayed on that version forever, pirated it or didn't use it. At least this way they get some regular revenue.
EDIT : Too late, but still true 🙂
if you add up the retail price of each version for business use then renting might actually have been cheaper?
For Adobe - yes, if you really want full Photoshop. I was previously using Elements, which was good, but they kept releasing new features quite quickly that I thought addressed the deficiencies, so I ended up buying 8 then 11.
For Office though - not sure. Office personal was only about £80 for three users anyway to buy outright. But then as said you get a crapload of online storage too which is quite useful.
Also as orangespyderman points out it's five PCs rather than three, so I could give two to my parents and/or my sister. Or my kids when they get old enough.
Gets my goat!
SAGE, we don't need the latest version.
We would like to do Payroll but that means an additional sub.
If you want to do pensions contributions, thats another sub.
Works out crazy expensive compared to buying outright but that is no longer an option AFAIK.
I would much rather buy the software and use it until the OS is updated and then buy again.
We do the same with vehicles, don't like renting anything.
[i]We do the same with vehicles, don't like renting anything. [/i]
It's a lot of capital to have tied up?
Pfffft. Last software i bought ($100) offered 5 years of support and updates included.
2 months later they discontinued it.
2 months after that it stopped working due to various codec and OS changes.
Then the "free" CD copy of the software arrived, that i couldn't even remember ordering.
I had to subscribe to get some new software, that's not as good. Think it's going to cost me about $80 over the same 5 year period. But it still works. 5 years later.
What was it?
Pretty good deal where i work. Full MSDN subscription so I can download any microsoft product for free + full creative cloud suite as the University pays for it for every staff member
Full Adobe Creative Cloud suite - Would much rather buy the individual apps every couple of years.
I only need 3 application and the cheapest way to buy them is to pay for the whole suite. The applications are updated regularly which I guess is nice but there's nothing been added in the last couple of years that's worthwhile to my workflow. The software is full of bugs and the customer support is atrocious.
Full MSDN subscription so I can download any microsoft product for free
Which is pretty sweet, but half of it you can't use in anger (Production). Great for yourself though - I have also got a HUP license, which is a nice bonus for legal Office.
We have an enterprise agreement, and renting makes significantly more sense in many areas as we are obliged to keep upgrading them to stay in support, and the prices are decently cheaper than buying outright (in our volume) .. plus it becomes an OpEx rather than CapEx and our current accounting regime like this. That pendulum will swing again sooner or later.
It's been pretty common for years in the enterprise, the idea is you're not just paying for the software but also for support, patches, upgrades etc.
In the home, I suppose it depends how important the latest and greatest version of something is, or whether you're perfectly with Office 2003 to write a letter to Auntie Mabel twice a year.
consider yourself lucky. I've just had to buy 25 copies of quick books because I can no longer buy licences for the 2013 product and the 2016 version 'upgrades' the file so it won't work in the old version. All just for two new usersSAGE
For work I like it now as the cost is similar but I can always have everyone on the same version which makes life easier. For home it depends on the package. Ms office is a winner but most others I still buy standalone
I should say I'm a '365 expert' and reseller so I'm far from unbiased.
365 for Businesses is good, clients love it once they understand it. And at least Microsoft have made the lease platform worthwhile - they also still sell stand-alone office suites. But not everyone wants to pay anything for it.
Lots of them however were reluctant to change - frankly a lot of them bought a single Office 2010 license in the dim and distant past and installed it as many times as they wanted without thinking they were doing anything wrong. Until FAST explained to them the errors of their ways by way of a big fine.
Fast-forward to Office '13, Office '13 isn't sold per machine, it's sold per user, by the letter of the license agreement (standard off the shelf office, not volume licensing) if/when someone leaves your organisation, the office license belongs to them - they can log into their office account - and just install it on any machine they're using so you need to buy a new one every time you have new employees. Businesses either assigned dozens of licenses to a single user (which is against their license agreement) or new staff were stuck with previous staff details on office. MS were forced to do this because of the massive wholesale theft of previous versions.
365 offers them the chance to buy exactly what they want, for who they want, whenever they want. It's usually much cheaper for them to use 365 if 1) they intend to comply with the licensing agreement 2) have even modest staff turnover and on and off board properly.
As for other software, sadly some is good, some it bad but it's how it is, take it or leave it - games will be going the same way too - they're dipping their toe in with 'season passes' for added content. I personally wouldn't mind as long as they don't take the piss too much, I've bought games I've paid £40 for and played once or twice and never touched again - if I leased that for £5 a month, I'd turn it off after a month, I think I would have spent about £180 on GTAV by now though...
It's a lot of capital to have tied up?.
We tend to run vehicles (x4) into the ground and not replace them until then.
Still running a 2000 pickup with no issues.
Granted if we were running a massive fleet then it would make sense.
Some of the big fleets rent tyres and vehicle graphics, never understood that..
it would be almost perfect if the share point (sites) sync worked rather than being quite as pants as it is 🙁365 for Businesses is good,
[quote="molgrips"]What was it?No idea. It was nearly 5 years ago, the computer has had some "major" updates (New OS disc, new OS and one or two rebuilds) The disc went pretty much straight in the bin. We don't even use the replacement so much anymore, everything is on Plex, or we use VLC if it's not.
Office '13 isn't sold per machine, it's sold per user
Does that apply to the home deal too? It says 5 PCs, but does that mean under one account?
Ghostlymachine - I meant what software was it?
No idea. It was nearly 5 years ago.
Or do you mean what type of software?
Bluray playing suite of some description.
That's what I meant yes 🙂
Does that apply to the home deal too? It says 5 PCs, but does that mean under one account?
Nope, you buy it under one Microsoft Account. The Install Page then has options to send invites to four other accounts. You can revoke the installs as well if you give it to a mate who then knocks your pint over or something.
Each of the 5 accounts gets the 1Tb One Drive, the accounts are separate too so the main account can't sneakily browse the other's One Drive unless they have the password.
Ace.
There's also a cheaper personal edition of 365, still gives you 1TB storage but installs are limited to yourself, but that can be multiple devices, just not more than one desktop install, phone install, etc.
For the storage alone it's worth it.
I also have Microsoft Action Pack for my freelance business. V.small companies only but gives you all the essential software to run your business including each desktop and server operating system, full enterprise version of Office 365 inc Exchange online & SharePoint, OneDrive for Business (I forget how much storage), plus Project & Visio, SQL database, Dynamics, on premises Exchange, amongst others, plus a slimmed down MSDN licence with latest Visual Studio. 5 seats of each in many cases. And Azure on top with a small monthly credit.
All for £330 a year.
Catch though is it's internal use only and tied to a single location. Basically stuff for running your business, demos, training, but not direct revenue generation.
Use free software? The subscription costs are highly competitive. 😉
Apart from a significant use of free open source bits and pieces, the services I pay for are:
Platform.sh for hosting
GitHub for private got repos
Browserstack so I can use strange web browsers
Bugherd.com for bug reporting
And a couple of actual local pieces of commercial software that are significantly better than open source equivalents:
Pixelmator
Sketch
Phpstorm (though I do wonder...)
Rachel
And a couple of actual local pieces of commercial software that are significantly better than open source equivalents:
Office 😉
Yes, office.
I will never trust these new-fangled cloud wotsits. Free software for me. Being a simple folk I don't need to access my data... But I could with free software, if I wanted, and my internet was fast enough. I tried using OpenVPN running on a PI to get access to my Debian NAS but couldn't even stream an MP3, was getting on for dialup speeds.
Our problem is crap broadband, so a home NAS would be difficult.
Office 😉
I’ve not really got much use for Office, tbh. You have just reminded me that, because of a tablet I bought, I have a free Office 365 subscription but don’t have it installed as I don’t really use it - the disk space is more useful to me!
Rachel
Other thing to consider - when I bought Office 2007 for personal use it only had Word, Excel, One Note and PowerPoint I think. The Office 365 sub includes Publisher, which my wife loves and finds really useful. Also Access, which she doesn't know what's for and probably nor does anyone else these days...
Scribus is better than MS Publisher, and its free.
Also Access, which she doesn't know what's for and probably nor does anyone else these days...
access for people who don't know what databases are...
Interestingly we started offering lease a few years back as it fits with the purchase cycle for the kionid of software and more importantly got under some spend limits it seemed 🙂
Yes Adobe Creative Cloud and Office 365.
No brainer for us, much better delivery and updates. Don't think it's any more expensive...
For the prices we charge to do the work we do, the cost is marginal. Everyone was up in arms about the Adobe suite but seriously graphics/video professionals moaning about 40 a month?
Also Access, which she doesn't know what's for and probably nor does anyone else these days...
We use it.
Legacy stuff only, thankfully.
[i]I also have Microsoft Action Pack...
All for £330 a year.
Catch though is it's internal use only and tied to a single location. Basically stuff for running your business, demos, training, but not direct revenue generation. [/i]
The biggest catch that each of the licences is a single install only.
HD goes and you reinstall? One licence gone.
Change PC? One licence gone
etc etc
And it's not per year, it's for the life of the subscription.
We've had our subscription for 10 years, no more windows licences left, no more Office. We're junking it and moving to 365, we've only been keeping it going because it had SQL Server included but our new hosts provide that now so we're giving up on it...
To be fair to them they do warn not to use them on virtual machines you setup for one time use on demos etc but it's still a right pain that they penalise you for being a long time user.
Everyone was up in arms about the Adobe suite but seriously graphics/video professionals moaning about 40 a month?
^This - if you can't clear £40 a month perhaps you need another trade.
Creative Suite is way, way better than the olden days when all printers in one area used the same copy of Quark Xpress! This copy was handed out by the local imagesetting bureau so everyone would come to them for their film output!
The bureau was a great source for fonts too.
<RMS> Your files and data are held hostage if you don't keep paying the subscription </RMS>
[i]Your files and data are held hostage if you dont keep paying the subscription[/i]
There's nothign stopping you using local storage for any of the MS365 software. It's what I do, then mirror to a local NAS and off to Dropbox (but you can do the same and use the MS storage as a backup service, not the only copy).
But, tbh, if you're using proprietary software you're already pretty much being 'held hostage' to that file format etc.
What I mean is: you've purchased a licence for a program, you can always use that copy of the program to open and modify your original files. It doesn't matter how old the version is, it will always function from the day you purchase it to the day you can't be bothered to use it any more. It's also common to be able to export the filetype. With a subscription based model, you are not able to work on your own files, as you were when you made them, if the current subscription is not paid. It is also uncertain if, say years later you pay for a subscription again*, whether the supplied software will be able to open the older filetype, and/or will be able to save it in the original format.
IMHO it's a reaction against F/OSS to find a new way to lock you in to the proprietary formats again.
Autodesk and Adobe are the masters of this game.
*In itself also a month or a week sub for perhaps only a file export operation lasting minutes.
What I mean is: you've purchased a licence for a program, you can always use that copy of the program to open and modify your original files.
Not quite true unless you also own old computers.
I have disks for the last versions of Freehand and Pagemaker - I don't have a computer that would run them though.
[i]It doesn't matter how old the version is, it will always function from the day you purchase it to the day you can't be bothered to use it any more[/i]
My wife nearly lost 15 years of pension contributions because the only PC that could still run a piece of software in the councils HR dept was scrapped by an IT dept as being 'too old to maintain'.
The only thing that saved her was some bloke who'd kept a few pieces of microfiche 'out of interest' and they happened to have evidence of contributions she'd made on them.
Owning the *right* to use something doesn't mean you *can*. Operating systems, hardware etc all change over time. You'd not be able to get a printer with an RS232 connection that easily because that's the only connection the Apricot PC you've got running windows 3.1 will allow to use (or whatever).
At least with a subscription service you can upgrade any files you have to a recent standard prior to unsubscribing.
@TMM - well the "as long as you can be bothered to use it" in the next sentence was to imply I understood that.
@WWW - assuming the subscription version has any forward or backwards compability. I was using a 3D package recently who dropped support for their own filetype after a year.
Of course this is not always the case, but based on my experience these issues are real.
Photoshop supports that open Raw file format, whatever it's called, but yeah I can see how light room edit history stuff might not be there in another format. However, Office supports open formats, and other software also supports Office formats.
The thing is with those particular products is that they are virtually standard software. So interoperability is not likely to be an issue.
They are also so comprehensive that it's hard to imagine the typical user needing anything else. I have no plans to purchase any other software.
[i]Of course thia is not always the case[/i]
very rarely - why would a software vendor not provide an easy upgrade path (even if it's a fairly crude file conversion process)? It just encourages people to look at alternative products.
It seems that the subscription model would work best with major companies with very large market share.
I think subscription for companies is not a. Issue but for personal use age especially house holds where program are infrequently used it is an issue. You may use a program twice a year And be happy with old software but do not want to pay xxx a month for a twice a year use.
Even for one man bands it can. Be a issue.£40 a month is nothing if you use it every day but if it is used once a month and you have 12 or so program like that it does become an issue.
molgrips - Member
Other thing to consider - when I bought Office 2007 for personal use it only had Word, Excel, One Note and PowerPoint I think. The Office 365 sub includes Publisher, which my wife loves and finds really useful. Also Access, which she doesn't know what's for and probably nor does anyone else these days...
And Outlook. Still better than any equivalent "free" mail solution, and essential if you work with Exchange.
wwaswas - Member
The biggest catch that each of the licences is a single install only.
HD goes and you reinstall? One licence gone.
Change PC? One licence gone
etc etc
And it's not per year, it's for the life of the subscription.
Hard disc change shouldn't trigger a new activation. Change other major hardware or use a new PC and yes you lose a licence and cannot be reused.
Life of the subscription is a year, in my case, as I buy an annual sub. I've got explicit instructions that if I don't renew I have to cease using all the products, including the operating systems.
Also another catch is you only get the latest, so you technically can't install an older version once they've been superseded. That said they've kept Windows 8 hanging around a bit as download and keys for them since Win 10 was introduced.
Still though, for a one man freelance software development business it's a good deal for me. Normal businesses would have to shelve out thousands for the same software.
but for personal use age especially house holds where program are infrequently used it is an issue.
It would be an issue if subscription was the only option, but currently you can still buy office outright.
[i]Hard disc change shouldn't trigger a new activation[/i]
If you reinstall the same software on the same pc it uses another licence.
I got caught out, changed to an SDD, backup up data, reinstalled windows and office, restored data. that's 1 windows and 1 office licence gone forever.
wwaswas - Member
I got caught out, changed to an SDD, backup up data, reinstalled windows and office, restored data. that's 1 windows and 1 office licence gone forever.
I did an in place upgrade. Backup documents, photos etc that wouldn't fit on SSD as it was smaller, then clone HDD to SSD, and boot. Restore documents etc to HDD set as second hard disc. All good and no reinstall, same licence.
Reinstall with no hardware change and it will still use the same licence.
This is my last post on the subject as i am only trying to put across a possible counter arguement, not actually trying to convince you to subscribe to some software...
Some of the very large vendors were coming under pressure from FOSS packages catching them up. By moving to a subscription package they have another way to compete against they free/libré alternatives but in doing so they gain more control over your data in the ways I mentioned (unable to access your files without a current valid subscription, filetypes changed more easily to prevent external compatibility etc).
Another issue is functionality - a great many of these packages have been effectively feature complete for years, the core features of them can be carried out by a version that is already several years old, or that is replicated effectively by a FOSS alternative - so, why would you continue to pay for it? Easly answered by filetype revisions within copyrighted formats - all your datas are belong to us ;P
Other issues - cost of training for high end packages and/or certification requirements means companies are reluctant to change the package in use. Also, with subs often for bundles of programs, are you not paying for something you dont need?
Currently most(?) cloud solutions keep your files available in read-only mode if you cancel subscribtion and you are free to copy the files from there. I don't recall how long e.g MS keeps the files available but it should be reasonable time.
GFS - I am not trying to be antagonistic so please accept my apologies. I'm just discussing the implications as I think it's an interesting shift in the industry.
Re your post - I don't see MS manipulating users like this. And there's two things going on in your post. Knobbling interoperability is not 'all your data belong to us'. However having you store it on cloud, that is. At least for personal users.
A cynical observer might also conclude that making £850 laptops with only 128Gb storage (MS Surface) is a play to get people to put their stuff on cloud where they can index it...
Naaah its cool. I did a presentation on it a while back, so I just felt like going over the arguments. Sometimes i feel like this place is kinda hard to drop the mic in, so i was explaining that i wasn't going to carry on the discussion, save ya typing me something too long 😉
Anyways, my copy of Office was rescued from a skip (really, with a valid licence and everything) and my copy of CS5 came from a shop in Bali, so..... 😛 I've never made any money from it, but i have required a couple of companies to buy CC subs because that's the SW I knew, so it's all gravy
No, use Apple free products. Excel is still the best full function soreadsheet but I don't need that at home.
Subscription model is ised to tie you in amd spend big £££ over time. I bought Office Home a decade plus ago and used the same version for years until I moved off Windows. Have a few other bits if software costing £10-25 outright
MS have been trying to kill it off since 2003 but it still lives because for some things it is still an appropriate product. I like it but like Excel, if you use it wrongly you can make a real messAlso Access, which she doesn't know what's for and probably nor does anyone else these days...
On the Office subs vs free software, the free software is great and does more than enough but the reason to use Office is just to get rid of one more problem to deal with. The free software is something else to learn and when you have to deal with club documents or school powerpoints or even work spreadsheets in a 'compatible' piece of software that moves things around slightly it just gets old in the end. It's worth paying for it just to get that particular stupid problem out of the way for a few quid a month
Libre Office is good, and brilliant when you consider its cost, but it's just nowhere near as good. I reckon Office is outstanding software.
Also, inter-operability with Office isn't perfect and can bite you on the arse.