In 2013, the leading productivity software and the leading creativity software both changed from a straight purchase to a subscription model. In the case of Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, and other apps, it's one of various Creative Cloud bundles, such as $49.99 per month for the whole library. In the case of Microsoft Office, it's Office 365 Home Premium, which replaces a theoretical payment of up to $2,000 (Office Professional, times five PCs) with a surprisingly reasonable fee of $99.99 per year to install Office on up to five PCs and Macs.

Office 365 Home Premium also breaks new ground in integrating traditional hard drive-based software with the cloud. By default, it saves your documents to a 27GB SkyDrive account, so you can access them from anywhere—streaming Office on Demand apps to any Internet-connected Windows 7 or 8 PC, or using the Google Docs-like Office Web Apps for quick edits in a browser.