Microsoft pushes home users toward Office subscriptions - whether they like it or not
Office 2013 is going to be, for most users, a fairly minor evolution of Microsoft's flagship productivity suite, except for one little thing: with Office 2013, Microsoft is pitching Office subscriptions to consumers.
The company has already been courting enterprise users with its Office 365 platform for a little over a year now. There are multiple price tiers, with enterprise users getting some combination of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Web Apps, and the desktop Office suite.
In addition to these enterprise-oriented offerings, the company today unveiled two non-enterprise plans. For $99.99/year, there's Office 365 Home Premium, giving Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access, plus an extra 20 GB of SkyDrive storage (in addition to the 7 GB that you get for free), plus 60 minutes of Skype calls per month. This is licensed on a per-household basis, and one account can be shared by up to 5 users across any mixture of five PCs and Macs.
