Microsoft Office 2013 365 Home Premium launches: Cloud syncing subscription service revealed

Gerald Lynch Features, Microsoft, Software, Tech Digest news
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office-356-home-premium.pngMicrosoft have today revealed Office 2013 with 365 Home Premium, the latest evolution of the company’s massively popular application suite.

Office 2013 and the 365 Home Premium options looks set to be one of the most different instalments of the suite ever to launch. Including desktop staples Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint, it now features online cloud storage and backup of documents, keeping up-to-date copies of files across up to five licensed devices, including PCs, Macs, Windows Phone smartphones and Windows 8 tablets. Documents will also be accessible through a web browser, seeing Microsoft directly challenging Google and their web apps in a space that the search giant has dominated thus far almost unchallenged.

“Today’s launch of Office 365 Home Premium marks the next big step in Microsoft’s transformation to a devices and services business,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

“This is so much more than just another release of Office. This is Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service with all the full-featured Office applications people know and love, together with impressive new cloud and social benefits.”

Office 365 Home Premium will be available as a subscription service too, letting users access the apps for £7.99 a month or £79.99 a year. Physical editions of the software suite will also be available. You can browse all the options here.

With the software now cloud-based, major updates are expected to land far more regularly than with previous editions of the suite, which have traditionally ran on three-year update cycles.

“This is a major leap forward,” said Kurt DelBene, president of the Microsoft Office Division.

“People’s needs change rapidly and Office 365 Home Premium will change with them.”

The subscription deal is sweetened further with 20GB of SkyDrive storage a month, 60 minutes of international Skype calling credit, with the voice and video calling application making its debut as an Office suite app following Microsoft’s purchase of the company back in May 2011.

Click here to check out the Microsoft Office website and grab a 30-day free trial.

Gerald Lynch
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2 comments

  • MS needs to extend compatibility to the iPad as it would be a big market for those business users using only the tablet as their computing device. The addition of free Skype minutes per month is a good thing. I do not see Android users wanting so much of MS stuff though.

  • MS needs to extend compatibility to the iPad as it would be a big market for those business users using only the tablet as their computing device. The addition of free Skype minutes per month is a good thing. I do not see Android users wanting so much of MS stuff though.

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