I'm sure you've seen the ads: "Get Perpetual Office for a super low price, it's so cheap it's too good to be true."
It is, although they don't express the tone that way. Instead, the ad says: “One-time purchase. No subscription. This is a Microsoft Office 365 account that activates up to 5 devices on all supported platforms including Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, tablets. You can install and activate as many times as you want on all 5 devices. The activation is permanent and for life. You can always reinstall or transfer to another device. Cloud storage is not included. The provided login name cannot be changed or merged with a personal account. Microsoft Office 365 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, and Publisher. This software is multilingual, you can choose your language during installation. Digital Download: Instructions for use will be emailed to you after purchase.
First of all, please note that the product described does not exist. A Microsoft 365 lifetime license that can be installed on five different computers is not real. Although the Microsoft Office site advertises a version that can be used without a subscription, it can only be installed on one computer system, not five. Also, the pricing of this alternate universe version of Microsoft 365 is significantly different from Microsoft's actual offering.
I still don't know why Microsoft doesn't sue vendors who advertise these too-good-to-be-true builds. Maybe it's because they look authentic. I know that for years users have joked about the complexity of Microsoft licensing. It's so complicated that if you call the company with a license question and don't get an answer you understand or like, you can call back and ask again. You will most likely get a totally different answer. If you don't like that one, you can call and try to answer number three. If two of the three answers were similar, there was a good chance that those two were at least mostly correct.
I focus on licensing because more and more companies like Microsoft are moving to subscription models as older versions of their software are no longer supported. For example, the Exchange business messaging platform. Support for Exchange 11 will end on April 2013. And while it will still work after that date, it's not a good idea to do so for commercial use. Many argue that no business should host email on their premises now, opting instead for hosted platforms that can monitor and defend against attacks. But making this change also means… moving to a subscription model.
Licensing for all kinds of software that used to be bought once or used for years has moved to subscription models. Another example is QuickBooks, the accounting platform for small businesses. For years, you could buy a version that worked indefinitely as long as you didn't use it for payroll. Then came the subscription models. QuickBooks Enterprise switched to an annual subscription model several years ago. Now the desktop version of QuickBooks has followed suit. (If you have QuickBooks and aren't using it for payroll, stick with version 2022 or earlier. Upgrading to version 2023 means you'll have to pay an annual subscription fee.)
As is often the case, the license change was accompanied by a change in the features offered by each version. The online version of QuickBooks is now better than the desktop version, especially if you're in work-from-anywhere mode. But if you do bookkeeping for many companies, switching to one online subscription for all of them could quickly become expensive.
License and software changes are also coming to the point-of-sale version of Intuit's QuickBooks. As Intuit noted, “…the platform the software is built on is unique, requires complex maintenance, and makes it very difficult to introduce new features. As a result, we have made the decision to discontinue QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale 19.0 effective October 3, 2023. There will be no future releases of QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale software and we will no longer sell QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale to new customers. . . We're working with Shopify to provide an optional POS solution. Obviously, Intuit has decided to stop supporting various offers and change their license.
Vendors typically switch to online versions because it's easier to build a platform that works in a browser than it is to code for different versions of Windows macOS. It's also easier to serve the wide variety of devices we now use, from computers to tablets to phones, on a cloud-based platform.
And let's face it, providers are turning to subscriptions because what business wouldn't want a more predictable revenue stream? Although you may want to continue using perpetual software, the market is moving in a different direction. Therefore, it is important when evaluating software online to stop and review the prices and features. And remember, if the terms sound too good to be true, they usually are too good to be true.
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