Cloud storage and online doc creation and collaboration musings
How many of my friends here use Office 365? The competition for cloud space, and online document collaboration is growing very competitive. For example, DropBox for Business just upped their disk allocation from 100 GB to 1 Terabyte, with extra permission controls for just $100/year.
Office 365 subscriptions, which are just $99 a year for up to five PCs or Macs plus tablets also includes 1 TB of disk space per user. Office.com itself, for online document creation and sharing, is free for Macs and PCs (paid for iPad doc creation) and includes 15 GB of storage. But so is a free Google Docs account.
I tend to use Google Docs for online creating and collaborating on Word docs and spreadsheets. I think that is 15 GB per user for the free accounts.
Yet on my Mac itself I’m still using Office 2008. So I’m wondering why I don’t get an Office 365 subscription, which will upgrade my Office immediately to Office 2011, and very shortly to Office 2014. I know Microsoft is playing catchup with Google Docs, but wouldn’t compatibility be better with my desktop Office apps and Office 365 in the cloud? Or does it really matter?
I’m thinking if I’m going to upgrade Office anyway soon to Office 2014 for the Mac, then why not subscribe to Office 365? That way I’ll have the most recent Office desktop versions at a reasonable price for both Mac and Windows. But if I do, should I start using Office.com more instead of Google Drive?
It’s all getting a bit confusing. I suspect most of the people I work with have been doing the same thing I have: using Office desktop versions on their Mac or Windows, and using Google Docs online. But isn’t that just because Microsoft didn’t have a viable online version to compete with Google Docs before? It’s hard to drag people away from the work patterns they are used to.
Any thoughts?
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