Microsoft is slashing the prices of many of its Office 365 plans by about 20 percent effective immediately, the company said this week.
Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based suite of applications includes hosted versions of Lync, Exchange and SharePoint, with Office offered as a customer-installed option. The service was launched last summer,to replace Microsoft’s older hosted offering, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The price cuts are the result of economies of scale: The more people who adopt Office 365, the less costly it is for Microsoft to offer the service.
“As we rapidly add customers, the cost to run Office 365 becomes more efficient. This is the beauty of the cloud where we can deliver economies of scale through our worldwide data centers and economies of skill with our engineers, administrators, and support teams operating the service,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Division Product Management Group, in a blog post. “With these efficiencies, we’re able pass on savings to make it even more affordable for customers of all sizes to move to Office 365.”
