Featured stories • • • • Before I get started, let's set the stage. First, and most important, you should know I pay for my own subscription.

I didn't get any 'press favors' with this thing. I signed up like a regular business customer and pay for it like a regular business customer. With subscriptions for me and my wife, that comes to $30 a month.

I bought the Office 365 Midsize Business plan, not so much because my professional service firm is a midsize business as because I use computing resources like a midsize business. I've got well over 100TB under one roof, somewhere around fifty devices on our network, and GigE into every wall of the house. So I bought the larger plan because we have a lot of data to store, mostly email going way back to before the turn of the century. For those of you curious why I chose Office 365 over Google, go ahead and read. It tells the full story. For the rest of this article, I'm going to go down the various features and elements of my Office 365 subscription and detail to you my impressions after a year. What I'll measure against is whether or not the $360 we spent for the year was worth it or not.

As Microsoft tipped in June, the retail version of Windows 10 Home is selling for $120. There is also a Windows 10 Pro USB drive selling for $200. We compare macOS vs Windows 10 Anniversary Update in terms of. MacOS Sierra gives desktop Mac users the features they've been waiting for. The Mac is a lot better and the cost is worth it.

Fps games available for mac. I made the transition to Office 365 because the small hosting provider was starting to evidence reliability problems and I rely on email for just about everything I do. After a year: Reliability problems have all but gone away. I have had no performance or functionality problems with the basic service of getting and sending email. Spam management is mediocre (I still get messages using foreign character sets), but the amount of junk I get is moderately manageable with rare false positives. I judge Office 365's basic Exchange hosting services as a win. Support quality When I first tried setting up my accounts with Office 365,. Since then, service quality has diminished.

I dread using Microsoft's support services. It's a painful and often frustrating exercise. After a year: Support is barely adequate. It's a complete gamble whether I'll get excellent support or terrible support. I sent in an email request for support on May 6. In response, I got a form letter that indicated the support rep hadn't bothered to read my request.

After sending back a scolding response, I finally got a useful answer today -- a full seven days after my request was initiated. I judge Office 365's support services to be barely tolerable.

It's there, but it's not good. Microsoft desktop applications One of the benefits of the plan I have is that each user can install up to five copies of the Office desktop applications. Both my wife and I move between three main machines, so we'd wind up needing six licenses to office.

In addition, I also use Office on my Mac, which would be a seventh license. Since we pay $10/month more for Office 365 than we did just for Exchange hosting, our cost for what is effectively seven Office desktop licenses is $120/year, which is a pretty fair deal. After a year: Microsoft promises free upgrades to new Office versions, but there have been no new Office versions. The PC version is not bad, but could use some improvement.

The Mac version of Office feels like a bad piece of shareware. It's painful to use, and hasn't been updated for something like four years. I judge Office 365 desktop applications to be a reasonable deal, but the lack of upgrades and new features is disappointing.

The shareware-quality Office for Macintosh is just plain inexcusable. Next: Office Web applications and OneDrive. By the way, I'm doing more updates on Twitter and Facebook than ever before. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at and on Facebook at. Office Web applications One of Microsoft's selling claims for Office 365 is the availability of Office Web applications, similar to the suite of Web apps that Google offers.

Of the Office Web applications, the only one I have used is OWA (Outlook Web Application). Web implementation of Outlook is terrible. First, for some reason, its interface is entirely different (and less usable) than the interface for Outlook.com, and you can't use Outlook.com with Office 365. Second, as I said, the interface is terrible.

You can't even specify the columns you want to see, so the bulk of the screen is filled with a subject line sitting on top of the sender name. No other particularly useful message information is provided without opening the message, and the application wastes tons of screen real estate. There are arrow icons in messages, but they're for forwarding or replying, not for moving back and forth between messages. It is painful to use. As for the other Office Web applications, the simple fact is I have yet to even launch them. You can't just login to your Office 365 account and launch an app.