Don’t look now, but Microsoft may be readying a consumer flavor of its Microsoft 365 service. A recent job posting reveals that the company is building a customer focused subscription globally.
For its various consumer services.
Including the likes of Windows 10, Office 365, Skype, Cortana, Outlook Mobile and perhaps a few others.
The original, enterprise variant of Microsoft 365 includes the operating system and productivity suite, as well as Enterprise Mobility + Security. But this one apparently focuses more on prosumers, which is a fancy way of saying folks that are entrenched in the company’s products and services.
Mary Jo Foley spotted a recent job posting for a Product Manager for the M365 Consumer Subscription that will join a new team building this consumer focused service.
This project will be supervised by the Modern Life & Devices team that oversees many different products
As the job listing reveals:
“As one of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar revenue businesses, the area includes the Windows platform and ecosystem, the Microsoft Surface device portfolio, Office 365 consumer services, Skype, Microsoft’s intelligent agent in Cortana and search efforts with Bing, as well as the Microsoft Education Team.”
Sounds interesting.
A big question that remains is whether the Redmond based firm will also plan to include its own Surface hardware in the consumer subscription — something like the new Surface Go would go a long way to make the bundle more appealing to consumers.
Perhaps with a monthly leasing fee?
In any case, this is the logical next step for the Microsoft 365 concept that the technology titan introduced at its Inspire partner conference in July 2017.
