Microsoft's default choice for Office is the subscription model, which is the company's preferred method of delivery and currently maintains 24 different SKUs (stock keeping units) spread between home, education, enterprise, government and non-profit.
The company currently has around 9.2 million Office 365 Personal and Home users (and more than 50 million Office Online users), a tiny fraction of the estimated total 1.2 billion Office users that have deployed the productivity suite. Still, the 9.2 million figure as of last quarter represents 30% growth, Microsoft recently announced.
Going forward, the idea with Office 365 Personal is to allow one individual to connect one PC or Mac, one phone and one tablet to the service for a yearly subscription fee, allowing for usage via the cloud. However, it's designed for personal use, as the name of course suggests, and not for those who want to use the Office apps for professional purposes. For those customers who need this better functionality and more features, those are provided by Office for Windows and its touch-optimised apps for work on the move.
Microsoft also recently announced that it is investing in strategic partnerships with device manufacturers globally, and Samsung, Dell, along with other vendors (nine of them) will bring the Office app experience to Android devices later on in 2015.
All eleven of these vendors will pre-install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype on their Android devices, in what Microsoft describes as a move to "literally hand deliver the entire productivity suite to users around the globe." Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President, Business Development at Microsoft, said that: "This is a big step forward for our cross-platform and cross-device services strategy, which will bring an array of Microsoft services to every person on every device."
Finally, at the recent Build 2015 conference, Microsoft revealed that it's making the Office suite into a platform, allowing developers to integrate their apps and services directly into Office 2016. In other words, you won't have to leave Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook to use third-party apps that will include the likes of SAP, Salesforce, Uber and DocuSign.
For example, the Uber add-on will allow Outlook users to set a reminder to call a car in order to get them to their next appointment, and the SAP add-on will let Excel users connect to the on-premise SAP server and import data directly into a spreadsheet.
Getting the preview version:
Click here for details on how to grab a preview version of the new Office' 16.