Review by Robert Moore

Innovation is a good thing when the point of innovation is to improve one’s products and to enhance the experience of ones customers. But innovation as a way of creating a false impression of progress to mask a need to perpetually carve out market share is vile, and it has long driven Microsoft’s business plan and service model. But two other marks of Microsoft has been its attempt corner a portion of the market, give the consumer no real alternative, and then force them to pay through the nose, meanwhile making it harder and harder to use previously purchased versions of the product. And to complete my portrait of the Microsoft that I hated to like, Microsoft had an absolutely dreadful customer service department. Not that Customer Service was inept, but merely unavailable. And turning the old department store adage on its head, not only was the customer never right, they were most likely very much wrong.

As a result, Microsoft had over time created a way of doing business that was out of touch with the needs of the customer. Indeed, I had come to dislike Microsoft so much that I stuck with my old copy of Office 2000 for years longer thatn I had any desire to. But I was not going to pay an absurd amount of money for a piece of software that they were only going to allow me to put onto one device, and that was not going to be supported by technical support.

So imagine my shock when I found myself something of a fan of their new way of doing business. Instead of being prohibitively expensive, Office 365 is reasonably priced. You pay less than $80 for a key to unlock a download on up to five devices. Or if $80 is too pricey, you can pay just under ten dollars a month for the same five-device key. And unlike in the past, when you paid a large amount of money for a single-user key to Office Lite (the Student Edition was essentially Word and Excel, while the subscription grants you the use of more Office programs, including Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, and One Note. What was once a prohibitively expensive suite of programs suddenly became very reasonably priced (no doubt in part because pirated editions meant that instead of paying an absurd amount of money to Microsoft, people would simply go to a Torrent site and get a free copy of Office).

And to make everything even more impressive, Microsoft’s customer service is more accessible than ever. I had a particularly difficult installation due to preinstalled trial editions of Office 365 on my new computers. Microsoft worked with me at length to make sure Office 365 installed properly on all of my devices. Not just that, but when I expressed the wish to use my Hotmail e-mail address on Outlook, they escalated the problem to a higher level tech support person.

Now, that doesn’t mean that this is a perfect product. I have not liked the direction that Office has taken since Office 2007. And Microsoft still fails to include a crackerjack WYSIWYG HTML editor. But all in all I’m impressed with the nontechnical aspects of Office 365. And I have to admit that it is kind of fun having at least portions of Office installed on my desktop, my lap top, my smart phone, and my tablet. In a family with multiple computer owners, it should be possible for each family member to have a full version of Office installed on their computer. I’m still not a huge fan of Microsoft, but I’m delighted to see them make their products more consumer-friendly.