SEATTLE – Two months after launching Windows 10, Microsoft has introduced a new edition of its other ubiquitous product.
Microsoft released Office 2016 for Windows on Tuesday, offering refreshed versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other applications.
Home users were able download the latest applications starting Tuesday, the Seattle-area software company said. Large businesses will receive the updated software early next year.
With the latest installment of the 26-year-old franchise, Microsoft is continuing its recent effort to nudge its customers toward buying its software by subscription, rather than as a one-time purchase.
The look and feel of the programs will be familiar to anyone who has used the 2013 edition of Microsoft’s productivity software, said Jared Spataro, a general manager of marketing with the Office team. Much of what’s new with the 2016 edition, he said, is better integrated collaboration tools.
“Until the last two years, we were so focused on one scenario – a single person on a PC banging out documents,” Spataro said.
A new co-authoring feature allows multiple users to edit the same document in real time, long a feature of Office’s Web-based cousins and apps built by Google and other Microsoft competitors. Also arriving is chat service Skype, which will be embedded within Office apps to let users send instant messages, share images of their work, or video chat from within a document.
Other new features include a search tool to locate specific functions within Office, and a research tool that pulls data from the Internet into documents.
Office 2016 will include presentation software Sway, which uses algorithms and design concepts in a bid to take font tweaking and other detail work out of document design. Sway is the first new member of the core office suite since the 2003 introduction of note-taking application OneNote.
Microsoft is pushing to sell the software suite through Office 365, the company’s subscription program, instead of the traditional model of a one-time purchase that gives the user rights to the software in perpetuity.
The subscription model, Microsoft says, gives customers the most up-to-date features and tweaks. The relationship also affords Microsoft more predictability in its sales by locking users into monthly or annual agreements.
In a blog post highlighting some new features of Office 2016, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Kirk Koenigsbauer said the company would begin rolling out monthly updates to Office 365 subscribers.
In July, Microsoft said more than 15?million people had subscriptions to Office 365 for personal use and that the figure was growing at a pace of nearly 1?million users a month. The company hasn’t disclosed a tally of its business subscribers.
Microsoft estimates about 1.2?billion people use some component of Office.
Personal Office 365 subscriptions cost between about $6 and $10 a month, depending on whether buyers opt for monthly or annual subscriptions and how many devices on which the software may be installed.
As a one-time purchase, Office 2016 will cost $149 for personal or student customers, and $229 for business use. Both are $10 increases from the comparable edition of Office 2013.
“If we were trying to push ahead, we would do away with perpetual (licenses),” Spataro said. “But we don’t think the market’s ready for that. I think we’re striking the right balance now.”
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