Forum Discussion
A generic question about Office 365
Interesting question, I think you are on the right track. My understanding is most new features are born in the cloud and don't correlate with any on-premise equivalent. Exchange Online isn't just Exchange Server 2016 with a slightly different build. There is some crossover with features of course (and a shared codebase) but Office 365 is way ahead of what Microsoft ship to on-premise customers. Some Office 365 features might get shipped in the next on-premise version like Exchange Server 2016 but lots of features are increasingly only available in Office 365. One example I can think of is Focused Inbox, which only applies to Office 365 Exchange Online tenants and users. Microsoft touched on some of these topics with this article - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/wbaer/2017/05/16/sharepoint-server-2016-and-beyond/.
I would also state that Office 365 is about more than just the 3 main services identified above (Exchange, SharePoint and Skype), but it's also a platform that integratese those services together with additional satellite services such as Flow, PowerApps, Planner, Yammer, Teams, etc. which will never have an on-premise "version". Many of those services have the ability to "reach" into on-premise data, but no where on the roadmap are there on-premise versions of those services.
Like many others have said, now the release cadence for the main services are "cloud first" and will maybe make their way to on-premise depending on the integration strategy and complexity required.
And even more different is the licensing model. For most on-premise customers, you buy server and user cals during your true-up period for an EA or Open Agreement, where in Office 365 it's all subscription. So if you acquire a new company, hire a bunch of people or have layoffs, you should/need to adjust your paid for licenses (especially if you need more) at the time people need to have access to those services.
At the end of the day, for IT Pro's, Office 365 is starting to let those people who have been focused on the technology for too long, refocus on the business and solve business problems (how do we get more done or streamline a specific process) rather than technology problems (e.g. What RAID level do I need to run on what supported SQL version for the platform for performance) .