General Consultant Discussion

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-s-new-in-Outlook-2016-for-Windows-51c81e7a-de25-4a34-a7fe-bd79f8e48647 Seems to me Microsoft is going to the Sage 100 school of little feature improvements for your subscription. Now that they have so many on Office 365, they are trickling out any real functional improvements

It gets even worse as you look at some of the (not very well thought out) features. Take Groups for example, Within Outlook you create groups to share email, files, calendars. Sounds cool until you wonder why Yammer or Sharepoint or even GroupMe are still around since they all duplicate nearly every single feature. And then when you try to use Groups you realize: - Can't add people outside your domain (ie - non subscribers) - Emails sent via Group still require awkward 1980's era REPLY-ALL which is a complete fail once the first person forgets ""REPLY ALL"" - The mere existence of Groups paralyzes you from investing time in any of the other myriad Office groupware (Yammer, Sharepoint, etc) because you aren't sure which one Microsoft is going to bury and you don't want to adopt a loser

This is why many subscription services will eventually fail. Currently the market buys into the subscription message ie lower tco. When customers begin to feel they are being tsken advantage of, competitors will offer alternatives such as perpetual licensing. The wheel keeps turning.

I think Doug is right. Many subscription offerings will fail unless they are justified by reducing costs or adding value. I think we are seeing it in the consumer market where easy credit has caused a bunch of really offbeat subscription or on-demand type businesses to appear. I think ERP probably can thrive on subscription. I do not believe there will be a long-term mass-market appetite for customers to subscribe to a product like Sage Live then go subscribe to 4 other ""bolt-ons"" to make it work for their industry. I think that looks good in a conference room and on a spreadsheet but in reality in order to carry that much subscription you must be delivering a LOT of value.