Microsoft 365, Office 365 price hikes delayed
- Reference: 1646741868
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/03/08/nce/
- Source link:
The hikes were confirmed last August by corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro and were due to be introduced from the start of this month.
Instead, at the eleventh hour Microsoft announced a special set of temporary discounts for cloud service providers that sells its wares.
[1]
"This temporary offset of the March 1 price increases will be in effect in CSP new commerce until 12 a.m. UTC on March 15, 2022, and is intended to allow partners to clear the backlog of orders for these SKUs due to high demand in advance of the March 1 price increases," [2]Microsoft said .
[3]
[4]
"The Modern Work pricing changes were activated on time on March 1, and the temporary offset is made possible through additional discounts via new commerce promotions. These discounts are in addition to the current promotional discounts on annual and monthly term commercial seat-based offers in CSP new commerce that have been in effect since January 10, 2022," the company added.
The new pricing includes an increase from $5 to $6 per user for Microsoft 365 Business Basic to a jump from $32 to $36 per user for Microsoft 365 E3.
[5]
For Office 365 E1 customers, prices will rise from $8 to $10, with the E3 and E5 flavours bouncing from $20 and $35 respectively to $23 and $38. The price increase do not impact consumers and education customers.
The price change does not apply to consumer or education products.
Last August, Spataro tried to justify the price hikes by pointing to the extra features customers had been lavished with. He pointed to 24 apps including Power Apps, Planner, OneDrive and Yammer.
[6]
It was, the company said, "the first substantive pricing update since we launched Office 365 a decade ago" and "reflects the increased value we have delivered to our customers over the past 10 years."
[7]Microsoft pulls MSIX discussions into Windows Tech Community
[8]DBAs massively over-provision Oracle to protect themselves: Microsoft
[9]GNOME, Mono, Xamarin founder Miguel de Icaza leaves Microsoft
[10]Microsoft says hello again to China, goodbye to Russia
Not mentioned by Microsoft was the need to keep those dollars rolling in and ramping up. Microsoft's revenues grew by a fifth – to $51.7bn – in its [11]last reported quarter, fiscal Q2 2022 ended 31 December 2021 , and operating income went up 24 per cent to $22.2bn from $17.89bn.
Although server products and cloud services have been the main engine for Microsoft of late, the Productivity and Business Processes segment that houses Office 365 (up 22 per cent to $15bn last quarter) has some legwork to do to keep numbers on that incline, especially as Surface keeps limping along (8 per cent increase in Q2 2022, 17 per cent decrease in Q1 2022). ®
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[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/partner-center/announcements/2022-march#6
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YieLuTDaKbAZmUDir4tu4QAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YieLuTDaKbAZmUDir4tu4QAAAMU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/07/msix/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/07/oracle_cloud_migration_microsoft_advice/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/04/de_icaza_leaves_microsoft/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/04/microsoft_azure_china/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/26/microsoft_q2_2022/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Sparato must be very thankful for libre office
"many millions a decade later" can be factored into the cost benefit analysis of exploiting a monopoly. If you protect your monopoly and use it to expand into different domains you can make many many billion a year. Being fined many millions a decade later is a small price to pay. Unless regulators grow some teeth these monopolistic shenanigans will continue.
Re: Sparato must be very thankful for libre office
See also [1]this recent LTT video about the evils of Edge .
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43nLgWXd5vo
Because bean counters always want year on year growth, it doesn't matter to them if they caused the world to end or the universe to explode - so long as the number is bigger this year than it was last year -- pure greed.
bean counters always want year on year growth
I've seen it happen - company owned by a corporate I worked for had a near-monopoly in the US (96% market share) so was obviously returning strong profits but because they weren't growing 10% a year the corporate bean counters wanted to sell them off.
Yammer
Honest questions:
1) Who on here uses Yammer?
2) Who on here knows wtf Yammer is?
Re: Yammer
Apparently it's not the same as Sweet-Potato-er.
Re: Yammer
I used Yammer when it was first new. I think it predates Slack, certainly Teams. It's weird that it still exists separately to Teams, rather than being consolidated.
It went wrong from the outset: Good features for the users, no support at all to a corporation trying to prevent information loss, leakage of customer data, etc. So the corporate response was a very reasonable risk adverse one of 'Banned.'
Sparato must be very thankful for libre office
Spataro tried to justify the price hikes by pointing to the extra features customers had been lavished with.
By itself, bundling unwanted software is not illegal but when a monopoly does forces purchases of unwanted goods with their unique product the EU will fine them many millions a decade later.