Microsoft Now Offering Free Year of Xbox Live Gold With Office 365 Subscription
You've got to hand it to Microsoft -- the company is willing to find novel ways of promoting its products. The company is now offering anyone who buys a year of Office 365 ($99.95 annual rate) a free year of Xbox Live Gold. That's worth $60 a year -- a not-inconsiderable value relative to the cost of Office itself. According to Microsoft, the offer runs from now until October, and signing up for it is quite straightforward (you can investigate the relevant terms here, if you're so inclined).
With the Xbox One dropping later this year, it's a decent way to subsidize the additional cost of the Xbox Live Gold subscription if you're interested in checking out the console but don't already pay for Xbox Live. The more we've learned about the NSA's various programs, the less interesting Office 365 is, in my opinion -- the only thing less attractive than a perpetual rental model in which your software access is tied to licenses you never actually possess a copy of is a perpetual rental model in which you pay for access to software and store the product you create online in services that the government can access at whim. While that's technically a feature of SkyDrive more than Office, Microsoft has been pushing SkyDrive integration heavily and leveraging it across the entire product stack.
But hey. If you want to jump on the Office 365 bandwagon, are planning to buy an Xbox one, and want to grab a free year of Xbox live on top of it -- it's a great deal.
With the Xbox One dropping later this year, it's a decent way to subsidize the additional cost of the Xbox Live Gold subscription if you're interested in checking out the console but don't already pay for Xbox Live. The more we've learned about the NSA's various programs, the less interesting Office 365 is, in my opinion -- the only thing less attractive than a perpetual rental model in which your software access is tied to licenses you never actually possess a copy of is a perpetual rental model in which you pay for access to software and store the product you create online in services that the government can access at whim. While that's technically a feature of SkyDrive more than Office, Microsoft has been pushing SkyDrive integration heavily and leveraging it across the entire product stack.
But hey. If you want to jump on the Office 365 bandwagon, are planning to buy an Xbox one, and want to grab a free year of Xbox live on top of it -- it's a great deal.
