Re:Apple Reports Third Quarter Results
by salamandersauce on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @07:30AM
(#27982584)
Can you even buy a standalone copy of Word or Excel anymore? You can't subscribe to them individually and you can't buy them individually so what does it matter if there is 5 *.exes or 1?
Which is not really relevant or interesting.
A product is not necessarily a program (an executable).
A suite can be a product too, and you can absolutely sell a suite as a single SKU.
In fact that's exactly what MS does 90% of the time, and it even used to sell it in shrink-wrapped box form.
And that's what Apple's subscription is selling too. So it doesn't make sense to say Microsoft's offering is a "single product" and Apple's is "a range of consumer offerings".
Well, Apple doesn't have a single subscription, they have several in totally unrelated areas (from Music to AppleCare, and from renewing your Iphone model every year leasing-style to Cloud backup). They do offer bundles for some, but not for others.
There is no program called Office.exe. Microsoft Office is not a single business product; it is a suite of products.