Microsoft delays again Office 365 price rise once again
Microsoft has postponed a planned price hike for its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 office software packages for a second time. Last August, corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro announced the price rise in a blog post, and it was set to take effect at the beginning of this month. However, the software behemoth has now postponed the shift until March 15.
Microsoft announced a set of interim reductions for cloud service providers (CSPs) that sell Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions just as the price rise was scheduled to take effect. CSPs have until March 14 at 5 p.m. PDT or March 15 at 12 a.m. UTC to submit transactions and have them invoiced at the company’s February 2022 rate.
According to a Microsoft support page, these interim discounts are intended to allow CSPs to “clear the backlog of orders for these SKUs due to increased demand in advance of the March 1 price increases.”
The first significant price hike
Microsoft 365 Business Basic will increase from $5 to $6 per user per year, Microsoft 365 Business Premium will increase from $20 to $22, Office 365 E1 will increase from $8 to $10, Office 365 E3 will increase from $20 to $23, Office 365 E5 will increase from $35 to $38, and Microsoft 365 E3 will increase from $32 to $36. These price increases, thankfully, do not affect the company’s consumer or educational offerings.
Spataro stated in August of last year that these modifications were the “first major pricing update” to Office 365 since its inception just over a decade ago. He also mentioned how Microsoft added 24 new apps to the software suite, including Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Stream, Planner, Visio, OneDrive, Yammer, and Whiteboard, as well as 1,400 new features and capabilities in three key areas: communication and collaboration, security and compliance, and AI and automation.
Microsoft’s revenues jumped by a fifth to $51.7 billion in the second fiscal quarter of this year, according to The Register, while operating income increased by 24 percent from $17.89 billion to $22.2 billion.
The company’s Microsoft Azure cloud services and server hardware, on the other hand, have been the key drivers of its recent rising income. As a result, Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes Office 365, will need to increase sales to keep up with the rest of the corporation.