Software developers make a profit by selling us the best product they can create. When selling pieces of their software in bulk, they offer licensing packages to businesses so you don’t have to buy 100 copies of the same CD. Now that an increasing amount of services and tools are moving into the cloud, it’s a lot harder to track how many licenses you’ll need and how much they’ll cost.

As a convenient cloud solution, Office 365 boasts nearly 30 million users. But that’s nothing compared to licensed versions of Microsoft’s productivity suite, which have more than one billion users. Office 2019 was announced in September and it will mean big changes for businesses that want simpler versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more.

Software licensing has been a thorn in everybody’s side for as long as we can remember. It’s no surprise that as software begins to help us to consolidate and combine pieces of hardware through virtualization, we’re confronted with this problem yet again.