There are now more than 430 million commercial M365 users globally, Microsoft said during an earnings call earlier this year.
Jack Gold, analyst at J. Gold Associates, said it’s not uncommon for Microsoft to raise prices periodically and “given the amount of additional processing it needs to do with its AI features, it makes sense to try and recover the costs of running a larger cloud footprint to enable those products.
“I don’t think the price increase will have a detrimental effect on customer numbers, as most are already locked in and will just go along with this,” he said. “While there is more price competition these days from Google, I’m not seeing a large shift away from Microsoft to Google office in enterprises, but Google is doing well in SMB/mid-tier.”
