Well...the Office 365 offer is indeed a good one (of course, I say this because I get a discounted deal if I wanted to). But I have not opted for it yet and probably won't for another year or so. I have three reasons for this decision and you can tell me if they are justified or not.
First, I already have a copy of Office 2010. I have one machine at home on which it is installed and has been since 2010. My office machine, well, has Office 2010 on it too. No investment on my part there. But then again, I rarely use that machine.
Second, the RT that I got has Office 2013 RT on it and for the functionality that it offers, it is good for my purposes.
Third, there are these freebies that come with Office 365 - the free Skype minutes, the extra Skydrive storage etc. The one that is of most interest to me is Skydrive since I like using it as my primary cloud storage solution -though I do have Dropbox and Sugarsync, which I use for distributing some of my files as a backup. Currently, I have the 7GB storage that comes with the Outlook account. But I will be getting myself 50 GB more for £16.00/year, which gives me a total of 57 GB in all which, I think is enough to take care of my mobile needs for the next 36 months.
I had toyed with getting Office 365 at one time and had even posted a query here about it. That was the time when I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 8 Pro. I thought of getting it because since I did the upgrade and not a clean install, I thought my Office 2010 copy would be invalidated (because when I had originally bought my copy of Office 2010 I was living in another country and had bought it there - there are some activation restrictions). But after checking with MS, I was informed that even if I did a clean install and had the valid keys, I could reinstall my copy of Office 2010, which I did last week - and I am happy to report everything works fine. So, I asked myself - what would I have gained by going with Office 365 if I had opted to get it?
I don't have many machines and I can't see myself having 5 machines between my partner and me. At the moment, my partner is remains with Android (on her Nexus 10 - I have one too!). Next month she will be getting a Win 8 phone (probably the Nokia Lumia 620) and in about 8 months from then, I think she will be ready for a Surface (hopefully the next iteration). But from what I understand her usage pattern to be, I think she would go with the RT rather than the Pro.
As for me, I would probably upgrade my home machine (which will necessarily be a ThinkPad laptop, which I will hook up to external monitors) in about 12-18 months time. My current machine is doing just fine and I don't see any reason to get a new one. The only thing I do see myself buying within that time period are the following: A Windows Phone (probably the Lumia 720 when it is released, which should be by the middle of this year) + 1 extra monitor to add to my existing one) + an external HDD (probably a 2TB or even a 4TB unit) + a couple of pen drives. Other than that, I may buy a port replicator from ThinkPad which I can use with my current machine and with a new one when I get it. In other words here repeating myself - I can't see owning 5 machines at any one time in the short to medium term. So, that leaves me with the same question - of what benefit is Office 365 for me?
The other thing that I remain wary of is this annual payment system. I already have a number of annual payments and I would prefer not to increase the number of such payments - they all add up you see. All this being said, I do see a situation arising, however, when I buy my next desk-bound machine (that ThinkPad that I referred to). At that point I may opt for (or may be compelled to opt for) what would be the latest version of Office (now that could be on a subscription model) but that would be because by then my Office 2010 copy will have become seriously dated and a new version would be in order.
So...do you think I am thinking this through incorrectly?
