The fallout from Microsoft's education price rises and service cuts continues as institutions weigh the prospect of bigger bills, and the Windows maker's rivals struggle not to pull "I told you so" faces.
The main takeaways are that free student email and collaboration services are being retired, and storage entitlements are changing. These changes generally apply at institutions' first renewal or extension on or after January 1, 2028. Microsoft announced the new plans last week, and the UK's Department for Education described itself as "disappointed" at the news.
As well it might be, although the UK government has rarely seen a deal from Microsoft that it didn't like. Or, for that matter, other US tech giants.
Exactly how much educational institutions will have to spend remains unclear. Mary Jo Foley of Directions on Microsoft put indicative student pricing at $2 per year for Microsoft 365 Education A2, $4 for A3, and $6 for A5, with Teams adding another dollar annually. Faculty licenses cost considerably more, while the new A7 student tier jumps to $385 a year before Teams. Foley cautioned that these were approximate figures, with actual prices set by Microsoft's partners.
The new no-cost student tier, Microsoft 365 Education A0, is a poor replacement for Office 365 A1: it excludes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. Eligibility also requires full paid faculty coverage on A2 or higher and students who actively use Windows devices for education – potentially awkward for institutions running fleets of Chromebooks.
A few dollars per student might not sound alarming. Multiply that across an institution, however, and something that used to be free becomes a recurring bill.
Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity, told The Register: "Free was the bait on the hook, and Microsoft spent years reeling in schools' email accounts, documents, identity management and classrooms onto its cloud."
A poster on the edugeek.net forums commented: "This was always going to happen, I remember thinking this when we moved over to the MS free cloud solution. It will be free until they decide it isn't."
The risk for Microsoft is that there are options. Meeks told us: "Schools now have a year to plan, and, in our experience with other large-scale educational projects, such as the University of Lille, that can be enough time to migrate properly."
Other options include Nextcloud, which will be rolled out as part of Germany's Educational Cloud Infrastructure. Several Swiss universities also migrated to the service over an August weekend. According to Nextcloud, 39,500 students, teachers, and researchers, along with 585 terabytes of data, were shifted.
Both Nextcloud and Collabora Productivity also highlight another factor that could drive educational institutions away from Microsoft: sovereignty.
Dr Patrick Alberts, managing director of messaging provider Element, told The Register: "When an organization is locked to a vendor, it should be no surprise when that vendor takes advantage. When switching is made difficult, the vendor holds all the leverage. They can raise prices or slash services on a whim, knowing customers will swallow the pain rather than rip out the infrastructure.
"Yet it's a bold move, given European governments are proactively following a digitally sovereign strategy."
Switching suppliers still takes planning, and the alternatives won't necessarily replace every Microsoft service. But the Windows behemoth has given educational institutions a fresh reason to investigate – and its rivals a particularly convenient opening pitch. ®
