Microsoft Office now free on your smartphone!

Sometimes, it is not even about creating documents, although creating documents is obviously vital to a selection of smartphone users, but the ability to open attachments that are in the format of the MS products. Before now, if you wanted to create or edit Office-based documents on your iPhones, iPads, or Android smartphones, you had […]

Sometimes, it is not even about creating documents, although creating documents is obviously vital to a selection of smartphone users, but the ability to open attachments that are in the format of the MS products. Before now, if you wanted to create or edit Office-based documents on your iPhones, iPads, or Android smartphones, you had to pay for an Office 365 subscription, which starts at $70 a year for non-business users. With the recent development, however, you can access most Office 365 products for document creation free of cost.
So, why is Microsoft giving away its premium product for free on smartphones? The company now seems to have accepted the fact that mobile computing is for real. It is a platform where competitors count customers in hundreds of millions. Thus, Microsoft might just be aiming to also count its customers in such large numbers. To be sure, the user base for Office 365 isn’t insignificant, based on the unit price of the product: subscription in June 2013 was approximately one million, but it has risen to approximately 7 million by 30 September 2014. Microsoft’s gamble seems to be that if more people try Office free on smartphones – the devices of choice nowadays – rather than turning to free alternatives, they’ll be more likely to pay for Office in other platforms, such as the laptops and desktops, which, for a long time to come, will remain the media where computing for productivity takes place. Note that not all the features in Office 365 are free to smartphone users. The “special features” include formatting columns of text in a Word document or changing the labels on a chart in Excel. You will need to pay for these capabilities. Also note that Office will still remain to be Microsoft’s biggest product line by revenue, since business customers, who are responsible for nearly 90 percent of Office sales, still have to pay for Office, even on smartphones.
A few of the Office-like productivity tools that Microsoft seems to be targeting include Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps, or Google’s bundle that includes Docs and Sheets. Also, services such as Evernote and Quip offer free mobile document generation and editing software. The latter also include more comprehensive versions that are much less expensive than Office. However, none of these competing products are as powerful as Office, and can’t ordinarily present a threat to the world’s best known suite of productivity tools.
Did I see this move by Microsoft coming? You bet. Remember 27 March 2014 when Microsoft started deploying Office products into Apple’s iPad tablets and tablets powered by Google’s Android operating system? The event provides tremendous opportunities for folks whose business involves creating documents and presentations, as they can now do so on the go, touchy-feely, in their favorite tablets. To be sure, Microsoft has deployed (non-operating system) tools on Apple’s smart devices before an Office app in iPhone was launched on 14 June 2013, and OneNote, a note-taking app for the iPad. However, the Office app for iPhone had a catch: It was available (and free) only to users who already subscribed to Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based Office program that costs $100 per year. That is, if you were using Office 2010 or Office 2013, you were out of luck. The Office in iPad deployed in March 2014 carried a price if you wanted to create your own documents. (There has not been MS Office in Android smartphones before now.)
Before the deployment of Office in iPad, productivity-users had relied on tools from companies other than Microsoft to do their job. Such tools include Apple’s own iWorks suite, Evernote, Quip, Smartsheet, and Haiku Deck. As an example, Quip, a word-processing program, is an app that works on iPad, smartphones, and desktops through a web browser. Employees in a company using Quip can work together on a document, by making changes of their own and viewing, in real time, the changes made on the document by collaborators.
The subscription model for Office in iPad sounds pretty much like Acrobat’s for its popular PDF (Portable Document Format) product. To just view (read) documents produced by others using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you don’t pay a penny: Just download the Office apps from Apple’s iTunes store and start using them. However, to create your own Office documents in iPad, you will need to purchase the license for the Office 365 suite. The acquisition is via a subscription model, costing you $100 for an annual subscription to the Home Premium edition ($10 monthly), $80 for Academic license, and $70 for the Personal edition. This license fee allows you five downloads of the Office suite on Mac or PC, in addition to five downloads on tablets. By comparison, the iPhone version, which, before now, was free only to Office 365 subscribers, allows you to view, create, and edit Office documents, although, realistically speaking, you can’t do much on an iPhone because of the small screen.
The takeaway from this article is that Microsoft has started to give away almost fully-functional versions of its Office 365 productivity bundle to non-business smartphone users (iPhone and Android systems) free of cost. Some functionality still carries a price.