More and better contact with the customer

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A better deal
For home use, you can use an Office 365 subscription on five different PCs, Macs or Windows 8 tablets. And five mobile devices within your 'family'. The exact definition of 'family' is up to you. The cost per year (€99) is considerably lower than buying five boxed versions of Office. So it's also a better deal. Microsoft does talk about a subscription, because Office is a much more generic software suite . Everyone has probably used Word, Excel or PowerPoint at some point.

The benefits for the customer are actually the same with Microsoft as with Adobe: you know where you stand in terms of costs (you do not have to invest) and you are always up to date. When purchasing the so-called boxed version of Office, you buy as many licenses as you need (this is mainly for SMEs, larger customers have special volume licenses). If you suddenly need more or fewer licenses, this is easy to adjust with a subscription, per month or per year (depending on the subscription).

In the business segment, you can also save on hardware and management costs with the hosted version. The model of paying for use also fits better into the current budgeting methodology. Companies are also starting to get used to this more and more, also due to the pay-per-use model of cloud computing .


For Microsoft itself, the situation arises that they have more and better contact with the customer. Where customer contact now runs via the reseller, there is also direct contact with jamaica phone data Microsoft. Always being up to date also reduces support and maintenance costs in the long run, because the company has to take less account of supporting old versions. The income stream also becomes more even: instead of a new version once every few years, there is a constant flow of income per month or per year.

I have to say that Microsoft will continue selling the boxed version of Office for the time being. Reasons for this are that there are enough countries where the broadband infrastructure is less good than in the Netherlands. There is no other option for users.

By the way, the deployment of Office 365 has not led to any uprising among resellers, because they can still play the role of trusted ICT supplier for their SME customers. And via the so-called Partner of Record, they can still get income from the sale of the license. Another option for resellers is to buy a volume license for their customers and offer this.