Microsoft Office 2013 Pricing announced..

With Office 2013, Microsoft is moving its most dominant product line to an attractive new subscription-based pricing and packaging model. Yes, you’ll be able to acquire Office 2013 the old-fashioned way. But the benefits and pricing of the subscription plans are so attractive you won’t want to.

What’s attractive, you ask? The Office 365 Home Premium subscription, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access, SkyDrive with an additional 20 GB of storage, and 60 minutes of free Skype calls each month, will cost just $99.99 a year. This subscription comes with a new “household license,” meaning that you can install the PC applications on up to 5 PCs (or Macs) around your home. Yes, that’s right: Microsoft is explicitly supporting installing and using Office on up to 5 different users’ PCs.

Luddites will still be able to buy individual retail copies of three Office 2013 suites, or acquire the software that way with new PCs. But why would they? Office 2013 Home & Student will cost $139.99, can be installed on just one PC, and only comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Assuming you only need those applications, it would cost you about $700 to purchase five copies of this suite for your family. For that amount of money, you could subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium for a full 7 years and, during that time, benefit from all of the upgrades that occur, including whatever full new Office versions are released. Combined with the additional benefits of the subscription, it’s a no brainer.

And somehow it still bothers the heck out of me to not own the software.  When you subscribe, you are really just renting.  If I'm spending $100 or $700 dollars, I want to own it!  This only makes Google Docs more attractive.