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While Microsoft (News - Alert) has been gently pushing people towards their cloud -based Office 365 offering, it looks like the company is starting to employ a harsher hand. The company has spent the better part of the last year trying to lure people over to its newest creation and away from the old versions by making it available on more operating systems and by pumping more and more features into the solution. Now Microsoft is making a move that it hopes will make people realize it just makes sense to begin leveraging Office 365.

The main part of this new approach appears to be to price Office 2013 so high that more people have no choice but to turn to Office 365. The company has announced that they will be boosting the price of Office 2013 by nearly 17 percent. It is also taking away the ability to purchase multi-license packs and that might be the best way to get people to choose to implement Office 365 instead. It was only earlier this week that the technology giant unveiled the pricing for Office 2013, as well as two new pricing plans for the cloud-based Office 365 which works by subscription.

This move is quite significant considering that this is the first time since 2001 that Microsoft has actually raised the price on the Office Suite. Industry analysts are fairly clear as to why they think Microsoft has raised the prices for the permanent licenses—because the company wants more people to use Office 365 which enables people to lease licenses, thereby making more money for the company in the long run.

However, the Office 365 provider does run the risk of actually turning off their existing customers with this sort of an approach. At least in the near future, there is no need for existing Office customers to make the leap from the 2010 to 2013 versions of the suite. The company is pushing people towards Office 365, but cutting off their supply for alternatives or pricing them out of the market could back fire badly if the company isn’t careful.

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