Microsoft 365 Review

The case for it has not changed in a decade. Excel has no equal once a spreadsheet stops being a list, Word is the format a contract arrives in, files open the same way on every machine a client owns, and Teams, SharePoint, Exchange and the admin center give one department a single place to set policy over all of it. For a household, setup is an account and a download. For a company it is a project, which is where the middle grade on setup comes from.

The money is this year's story. On July 1 Microsoft stopped treating Copilot as a promotion and folded it into the lineup. The bundled business plans became permanent products, the standalone assistant moved up to twenty one dollars a seat, and base plans rose alongside them, so organizations that never asked for an assistant are paying more at renewal purely from the repricing underneath. Consumer subscribers got the same treatment about eighteen months earlier: a personal plan at $99.99 a year, a family plan at $129.99, and a monthly credit allowance for the assistant that only the account holder can spend, not the five people sharing the subscription.

Classic plans at the old prices survive without any of it, but only for customers who already hold one and go looking. The software remains excellent and the lock in complaint remains fair, since anything outside this ecosystem is treated as an inconvenience. What is new is that the bill is no longer the quiet part of the pitch.