Not really. Office 365 Home Premium is the equivalent to Office Professional. Office Professional is $390 and you can only install it on one PC. Office 365 is $99.99 a year and you can install it on up to 5 PCs. So even if you have just one PC, it would take almost 4 years for 365 to match the cost of the stand alone version. And if you have 2 PCs the cost for the stand alone version soars to $780, thats almost 8 years of paying for 365...
It's swings and roundabouts, isn't it? It works out that way at today's figures and that's the way MS want you to see it, but things don't stay the same. If anything, I expect Office 365 to get more expensive as the product gets more popular and entrenched, allowing MS to extract more money from people and squeeze out the competition. I expect MS to remove the non-saas version completely within a year or so too and do an Adobe.
Also, I really don't like the idea of having to keep paying a company in order to use their product. Adobe have done this with all their apps now and people aren't too happy at having to keep paying them to continue having access.
No, this is a fundamentally different business model and the software companies wouldn't have moved to it had they not seen a way to make more money with it than the current model. In other words, it's gonna cost you more.
Imagine if all the major software on your PC had a monthly fee attached to use it? Starts getting pricey and you'll quite rightly feel that you don't own your PC which you paid good money for.
In the end, rental in any market, whether it be houses, cars, computer software or whatever sucks for the customer and makes for a nice little earner for the vendor.