The company is lowering the price of its most expensive smaller business offering — from $15 per seat per month to $12.50 — and raising the employee cap in some cases to 300 from 25. Microsoft has preserved a $5 per seat per month Office 365 option that includes its cloud products,  but not desktop versions of Office proper.

The moves are customer-friendly because we are in a period of intense competition. Microsoft wants to bring people in from the cold of their past multi-year software buying cycles, while also shepherding smaller companies and businesses into its fold by selling them Office as a service at moderate price points.

Google, Apple, Dropbox, and Box want that same action. Far more than a trillion dollars in market cap is fighting for the right to store your files and help you edit them. Those firms would very much prefer if Office 365 were a flop.

Here are the new plans, via Microsoft:

Office 365 Business – The full Office applications – Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Publisher, with 1TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone.

Office 365 Business Essentials – The core cloud services for running your business – business-class email and calendaring, Office Online, online meetings, IM, video conferencing, cloud storage and file sharing, and much more.

Office 365 Business Premium – Get everything from both the Office 365 Business and Business Essentials plans.

The new options will go live on October 1.

Office 365 is becoming Microsoft’s Amazon Prime: A solution you pay for yearly that contains a kitchen-sink-like quantity of this and that. Microsoft, like Amazon, isn’t afraid of mixing in a slurry of services. If only Office 365 were as aptly named as Prime

via New Microsoft Office 365 Plans For Small Businesses.

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This covers all versions of Windows 7, Mary Jo Foley points out.

The end of support generally means no more updated features or performance improvements, unless you are covered by extra “extended support.”

UPDATED: Microsoft has promised to provide security patches even after it ends mainstream support, through 2020. What is ending is design changes, warranty claims, and no-charge incident support.

This move will mostly affect consumers. Businesses that pay for extended support for Windows 7, as most of them do, will get all updates for another five years, until January 14, 2020.

That’s important because many businesses are right now in the process of upgrading their old Windows XP PCs, but they’re moving to Windows 7, not Windows 8.

There’s some speculation that, given the popularity of Windows 7, Microsoft might change its mind as the date nears and continue to support it a bit longer as it did for Windows XP. All told, Microsoft supported XP for about 13 years.

That kind of extension doesn’t seem likely at this point. Remember, Windows 8 basically includes a full version of Windows 7, called Desktop mode. With Windows 8.1, it’s possible to run a Windows 8 machine in Desktop mode and almost avoid the new-and-confusing Windows 8 part of the OS.

And Microsoft really needs to nudge consumers into buying Windows 8 machines. More Windows 8 machines mean more developers will want to write software for Windows 8, which will make more people want to buy it.

By the way, Microsoft also set the end-of-life of mainstream support for Windows 8 (including the latest version, Windows 8.1), for January 9, 2018.

This is another hint that Microsoft should have its next version of Windows ready in 2015, code-named “Threshold” (sometimes referred to as Windows 9).

If Microsoft plays its cards right, Windows 9 will be to the unloved Windows 8 what Windows 7 was to Vista, which InfoWorld ranked No. 2 on its list of the 25 biggest tech flops (also PCWorld’s “Biggest Tech Disappointment” of 2007.)

Here’s the chart from Microsoft’s Lifecycle Support page.

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