Microsoft’s Power BI for Office 365 has launched out of preview mode and gives us an idea of how Redmond looks at data analytics, visualization, user interface and enterprise licensing in creating what it hopes will be business intelligence for the masses.

This is a key step in making Big Data a mass-market phenomena, at least in enterprises, and further drives what used to be IT work out to the trenches.

Working with Excel, Power BI gives reasonably bright users the ability to model and analyze their data and query large datasets with complex natural-language queries. Power View and Power Map allow users to better visualize data in Excel.

In every key area, Microsoft Power BI fails to break new ground, but in a good way. Power BI works atop Microsoft Excel, benefitting from a user interface everyone already knows and most at least tolerate. Given the number of users Microsoft expects – I saw “one billion” quoted, perhaps only half in jest – user familiarity is a big win.

PowerBI is a DIY approach to data big and small. While IT will setup the data sources, at least many of them, the slice-and-dice will be done by users on their own machines. This positions PowerBI as a competitor to products from Tableau and Qlik.

Yes, you’ve seen these features before, but not atop Excel in such an accessible form.

Fair to Partly Cloudy

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Office 365 and Power BI are not strictly cloud offerings, relying on a combination of downloaded code and online functionality. The Business Intelligence features will likely rely on cloud data in many applications and a fully in-the-cloud version of Microsoft Office 365 is almost sure to arrive. Eventually.

In a nod to the cloud god, Microsoft plans to roll out Power BI, not in a series of releases, which is so 1990’s, but as an ongoing stream of feature enhancements and changes, rolled out as seamlessly as Redmond can manage.

In a blog post, the New York Times described this as “losing a (version) number to try to gain a future.”

“The construction of this product also says much about how Microsoft hopes to grow,” the Times reported. “Power BI is probably the last big undertaking overseen by Satya Nadella before he was named Microsoft’s chief executive. Mr. Nadella spent a lot of time in business software, search and Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing business. Each part of that background is in this product.”

Linking desktop software to behind-the-scenes updates isn’t new, but it does point toward a future where all Microsoft products become subscriptions and formal release cycles – where everything gets major updates all at once – become less and less important.

Subscriptions Mean Never Having to Say “Big Check, Please?”

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No longer will Microsoft have to convince customers to purchase a new software suite for big dollars. In low quantities, PowerBI is introductorily priced at $20-per-user/month. I mentioned that one billion number earlier – supposedly the total number of Excel units ever sold – to hint at the size of the potential market. No, Microsoft won’t get a billion users, but even a tenth of that is huge money.

At the same time, $240-a-year, per user, is serious money for what is, after all, an add-on, albeit a powerful one. Subscription software threatens to nickel-and-dime IT budgets to death. It also means that one user’s copy of Excel will look and function very differently than those used by others, perhaps in the same department.

I know its complex, but maybe subscription pricing should not be based on desktops or users as much as upon the actual usage. Customers could then install much more widely, knowing they’d only pay for software as it was actually used.