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Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019 (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft today launched a marketing campaign pitting Office 2019 and Office 365 against each other. The goal? To prove Office 2019 isn't worth buying -- you and your company should go with Office 365 instead. In a series of three videos, twins Jeremy and Nathan calculate the differences in Excel, Cynni and Tanny present their findings in PowerPoint, while Scott and Sean type it out in Word. The ads are cringe-worthy, to say the least, but they do get the point across.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
So have your employees twiddling their thumbs while MS tries to fix their broken infrastructure? That will go well...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
I hate that it doesn't actually work.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
Here's where the real confusion sets in. Office 365 is both a unique set of products/services and a unique way of paying. I use Office 365 - and I have the normal versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my computer. I don't save anything to Microsoft's cloud, and I don't use the cloud version of the apps. After factoring in the online meeting functionality and the excellent hosted email services that I would have to buy from someone anyways, it probably only costs me $50 a year. For that, I get to install Office on every PC and laptop in my house (limit 5).
So, for many people Office 365 is simply a subscription plan for good-old-Office. For others, it's a cloud service. For others, it's a combination of both. But, if I miss one payment, all I lose is the ability to edit files. And I can always choose to switch to LibreOffice as long as I'm using the subset of functionality it supports.