We set up a satellite office with 40 employees.  I need to get Office on them, with the usual business applications - Word, Excel and Outlook.  I looked online, and I think I'm misreading, but is there any financial sense in going 365?  Am I misreading the pricing?

Office 2013 would cost me $8,800, once, while 365 would be $4,000 per year.  So, in the third month of year three, I save $330 per month. Am I missing something?  We don't need cross platform usage, we don't need technical support . . am I missing some feature?  We typically hold on to our PCs for five+ years, meaning Office 365 will cost us $12,000 more over five years and two months.  I feel like I am forgetting something or not reading something correctly; are the costs that stark?

If you are going by 5 years, then you'd be getting at least 1 version upgrade during that time with Office 365 which would equate to another $8,800 investment.

Also, with an Office 365 license, each employee would be getting 5 installations rather than 1 and access to full feature Office Mobile applications on iPhone, iPad and Android as well.

Office 365 also includes some additional Office application in comparison with the msi-based installation, but if you don't use those, it wouldn't be a real benefit to you.

If you don't want to keep up with the latest version automatically or additional licenses and additional Office Mobile features, then the msi-based installation may indeed be cheaper for your over that period.

Thank you for pointing all that out.  You've helped me clarify our position.

We don't upgrade Office unless there is a feature in the upgrade that we need.  There has been no feature in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook that our business needs since Office 2003, which some people are still using.

No employee is allowed to install company software on any device except their company owned laptop or desktop.

I guess what threw me was how soon the non-cloud software would pay itself off.  In most other leasing deals, it's four to six years before you see a return over renting . . . but two years and three months?  And the difference is $1,000 every three months?  I could buy an entire new hardware PC, including Office, every three months, over renting Office.  I just had no idea the numbers were that stark.  I was sure I'd made a math error or some other mistake.

I don't want to sound like I'm excoriating Microsoft; they make great software.  I'm just puzzled by the financial implications.  Thank you for responding.