Who says it's only an "initial pricing" plan? This isn't like paying for cable internet, where they'll tell you how much the 'starting at" rate is for the first 12 months, but won't tell you what the actual rate will be for the remainder of your 2- or 3-year contract until after you get that first full-price bill.
If anything, the price is actually coming down, at least in terms of the consumer's buying power. For example, when Office 97 came out 17 years, a full stand-alone cost $499 USD, $599 if it included MS Access. That got you a single CD, or 44 floppy disks, to install it from. And it was still under the "1 copy, 1 PC" license -- they just didn't have the online verification available to hlep enforce it. So even without accounting for the lower purchasing power of the dollar from 17 years ago, they were essentially paying for a seven-year subscription. And while you can still find Office 97 on Amazon (now for about $30), you really won't see anyone continuing to use it because it was designed for Windows 98; people are complaining so much about die-hards holding onto their Windows XP computers, that I really can't see anyone advocating holding onto software that predates it.
And as for version replacement... you do remember that they only took two years to go from Office 1 (1990) to Office 3.0 (1992), from Office 4.0 (1993) to Office 95 (1995), from Office 95 to Office 97 (1997), from Office 97 to Office 2000 (1999), from Office 2000 to Office XP (2001), & from Office XP to Office 2003 (2003)? Or that it was only one year between Office 3.0 (1992) & Office 4.0? The longest gap was between Office 2007 & 2003 (4 years), with 3 years between Office 1.0 (1990) & 3.0, between Office 2007 and Office 2010 (2010), & between Office 2010 & Office 2013 (just barely in January 2013). In other words, historically speaking, the chances are good that the next MS Office version will come out in 2016...in other words, 3 years after Office 2013, but only 2 years from now.
Now, you're probably right that someone who just bought Office 2010 a few years back can probably go without an upgrade. However, there are many people that were still using Office 2007 (which is currently only in "extended" support for a couple more years), or worse Office 2003 (which also just lost "extended" support recently). Since they will need to upgrade their versions of Office, their question becomes whether to pay for the stand-alone Office 2013 (again with the "1 copy, 1 PC" limitation), or pay for a "subscription" plan that costs them the same amount over a 2- or 3-year period but lets them load it on more devices...& will probably allow them to automatically upgrade to future versions without hassle.
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