Everything changed last week, and for the better. Google and Microsoft both made their respective productivity AIs broadly available to customers. Google went all-in and discontinued its paid Gemini Advanced add-ons. Microsoft strove for more of a middle ground in retaining its paid Microsoft 365 Copilot (commercial) and Copilot Pro (consumer) add-ons while bringing all their constituents features to Microsoft 365 subscribers with a monthly-based usage limit.
This wasn't a surprise: Microsoft had previously made this change in select markets, and Microsoft 365 subscribers were already seeing mentions of "AI credits"--the "currency" one pays toward their monthly usage limit--in AI-powered Windows 11 apps and web apps like Designer. In this sense, stories claiming that Microsoft somehow "followed" Google are incorrect, but also unimportant. To me, the big news is that the way we pay for AI functionality in mainstream productivity products and services changed forever last week, mirroring the I Will Not Pay for AI (Premium) editorial I had written last year. To me, this makes more sense than the expensive paid add-on model that goth companies previously used exclusively.
I wrote about this shift twice last week, first when Google announced its shift and then again when Microsoft completed its shift. But it quickly became clear that some of the fine print on the Microsoft side of this change would result in questions and consternation. That is, the change Microsoft was making wasn't necessarily as good as originally believed. And customers quickly started demanding more.
The most obvious issue is that only the person who pays for Microsoft 365 Family gets AI credits each month. The other 5 users on this plan do not. And there's no way for the original/paying user to "gift" AI credits to others or more generally share them within the family group. Microsoft's response? Any other users in a Microsoft 365 Family group who want to use what used to be Copilot Pro features exclusively can simply pay for Copilot Pro. This would be reasonable if Copilot Pro was affordable. But Copilot Pro costs an additional $20 per user month. That's an additional $240 per year, far more than the cost of the base Microsoft 365 Family subscription for all six users despite delivering an order of magnitude less functionality.
Given this, the complaint is legitimate. I still feel that Microsoft 365 Family is a no-brainer given the generous nature of the offering: Full access to Office desktop apps, full functionality in Office mobile, no ads in Outlook, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and so on, and for all six users. But the incommensurate cost of AI remains troubling and a real pain point for customers. It feels unfair.
But questions remain. The most obvious being, what could Microsoft do to make this right?
This is a consumer offering, so introducing some kind of management portal through which the subscription owner somehow allots AI credits to other use...
The post Baby Steps (Premium) appeared first on Thurrott.com.
Source: View source
