Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365
You awake to find yourself in a dark room... with an empty wallet
Did you have a collection of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books? Microsoft offers something similar in the form of its subscription plan advisor, though it's tricky to avoid one particular priced outcome.
A Register reader got in touch after using the Microsoft 365 Plan Chooser. Answer six questions via the tool, and a result with a recommended plan will be displayed. This might be the Business Basic plan for $6 per user per month for an annual subscription, the $12.50 Business Standard plan, or the mighty $22 Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
Our reader mused: "If I follow the menu choices, it always selects Microsoft 365 Business Premium as the outcome."
Accepting the challenge, and because we still remember the excitement when a new Steve Jackson tome hit the shelves, we decided to try for ourselves, urged on by our reader: "Have a go and see if you can get it to choose another outcome..."
As with many Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, there appears to be a key question: "Do you have access to an IT professional for advanced support and services?" Say yes, and almost all paths lead to the premium option. Say no, and basic or standard await.
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A cynic might wonder if this means that Microsoft assumes there's an IT budget to be plundered if there's an IT pro on hand and so goes directly to the premium option. Or perhaps it's just that with someone around who knows a bit about computers, the variety of options available at the premium level makes more sense.
In honor of the countless hours spent on the computers in WHSmith while checking if the latest fantasy adventure book had been published (yes, we were also keen on the works of Ian Livingstone), here's some very inefficient BBC BASIC to speed along the decision process.
10 INPUT "DO YOU HAVE MONEY? " A$ 20 IF (LEFT$(A$, 1) = "Y") OR (LEFT$(A$, 1)="y") THEN PRINT "GO PREMIUM" ELSE GOTO 10 30 END
Anybody making an IT purchasing decision based on a six-question survey perhaps deserves what they get, and we're sure Microsoft would recommend more thought be given and advice sought on which plan makes the most sense.
We asked the company if it could share the logic behind the questions and the weightings assigned to the selections, but it has yet to elaborate. ®