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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.

16 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Have it your way, MS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I will then not give you any money, for there is no way in hell I am going to pay you a recurrent subscription.

  2. they are half right........ by wolfie_cr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    actually neither are worth buying for probably higher than 90% of people.........libreoffice all the way

    1. Re:they are half right........ by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Quite true.
      Now if we can get Schools and Universities to use it and recommend it to students. Vs. Having the Professors with Cool Microsoft Swag to make sure the students pay for legit MS Office copies.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:they are half right........ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well.....if enough people used LibreOffice, then they wouldn't NEED compatibility with MS Office.

      LibreOffice, for great justice!

    3. Re:they are half right........ by damn_registrars · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Compatibility is the only reason MS still exists.

      To be honest, MS is often poorly compatible with MS. Compatibility is not the reason they exist.

      The reason MS - and MS Office in particular - exists is because it gives businesses an out if something goes awry. If I'm at business ABC and I get an important Office document from a customer from business DEF, I need to be able to show that I'm doing everything reasonable to open it. If it came in Office format and I have the latest version of MS Office, I can check that box even if the document eats shit and is completely unreadable. However if they send it to me and I have libreoffice (or any other non-MS Office suite) and can't open it, that is my fault. And there is money on the line, so I had best make sure I do everything I can to prevent cross-incompatibility.

      --
      Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    4. Re:they are half right........ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Submit in PDF?

    5. Re:they are half right........ by Solandri · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Microsoft already has that covered. Students and teachers can use Office 365 for free. It's like a drug - the first hit is free, and gets you addicted to an expensive lifetime habit.

      At least with their old program (where a student could buy a standalone copy of Office for $5), you could continue to use it even after graduating.

  3. Well duh. by Smidge204 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If a customer BUYS your software, then you get paid once but you still have to support it for years.

    If the customer RENTS your software, Software-As-A-Service, you get them to keep paying you annually or even monthly.

    Kind of a no-brainer for Microsoft, really. An owned copy of the software costs what, $200-$250? They keep you subscribed for two and a half years and that's covered. Relatively few people will BUY new software every year when the old versions work just fine, so you absolutely make more in the long run through subscriptions.
    =Smidge=

  4. more like rent by Locutus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy."

    Buy? They don't want you to buy anything, they want you to rent it.

    --
    "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
  5. Re:SaaS is news? by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The side effect for the company. Other then just printing millions of CD's for you app and selling them for a hundreds of dollars. You now need to maintain a full data-center to handle the data for millions of customers.

    Cloud is good when you need to share across networks. Or you are a small organization who just doesn't have a secure infrastructure. But for others having software that you can buy and keep updated (or not) yourself is useful. There isn't too many features past office 97 that I really need. Why can't I use office 97 for work.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  6. Re:What is even the appeal of "the cloud"? by DarkRookie2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No one should want it, but Microsoft's marketing budget is at least 10 times their programming budget at this point.

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    http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
  7. Microsoft Tax by labnet · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Office is the main reason I detest Microsoft.

    In Australia, office 365 without exchange server costs $144/yr.
    We get 10 years from an office licence, because let’s face it, nothing has really changed in a long time. So that’s $1400 vs $280 to buy an outright retail licence, so 500% more expensive.

    We don’t use their file storage, because we don’t trust the cloud and it fragments our data backup strategy.

    I would dearly love to move our 50 users to Libre, but Libre doesn’t have outlook, and still screws up document formatting.
    No wonder it’s called the Microsoft Tax.

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    46137
  8. 45% of software features are used by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Long known truth: Most software features are never ever ever used.

    MS knows it, Adobe knows it, Oracle knows it yet they throw new features out, rebrand the UI, create a new UI layout every 2 years, etc... just as a way to say it's new and shiny so buy the new version.

    "Why 45% of all software features in production are NEVER Used."
    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-45-all-software-features-production-never-used-david-rice

    Steve Jobs did a disservice to us when he chromed up the UI and let UX design icebergs of wasted nuances. That's billions of wasted dollars producing disposable features and shiny UI..

    Consider the extra $500.00 you'll spend for screen animations, the flashing stylized boot up logo, etc in your next car. Not to mention phone integration, apple car play, remote start, remote control via a smartphone app, voice commands for radio, phone, etc, .....

    That's $500.00 you could have spent paying of your student loans.

    It's known as the 'technology creep tax'.

  9. Re:SaaS is news? by kurkosdr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't need the latest MS Office features? No problem, Microsoft has a solution for that. Constant format changes (which you have to track if you want files that other MS Office users send you to open properly) will make sure you 'll have to buy the newest MS Office version. Or subscribe to Office 365 when "buy" is not an option anymore. Good luck convincing your boss or your professor how he should change Office suites or how he should not use the latest version of the Office suite (or that he should risk document mangling by using an older format version). The tactic is called "planned obsolescence by use of network effects" btw...

  10. Re:SaaS is news? by Solandri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The really stupid thing is that unless you're collaborating with someone on a document, you shouldn't be exchanging Word of Excel or Powerpoint documents. Those programs are for creating the document. Once it's created, you're supposed to print it out (to paper or a PDF) and distribute that to the people you want reading it. Emailing people the .doc file is like sending the source code to someone who only needs a copy of the executable, then telling them they need to buy a copy of the latest compiler to convert the source code into the file that they really need.

  11. Re: SaaS is news? by rtb61 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why not take the freedom challenge. Download https://www.libreoffice.org/ and install and try it, no matter how much you like it, you will not have to pay for it, yours forever as is access to your documents. Take the freedom challenge or pay rent to M$ for the rest of your life, 10 years, 20 years 50 years, 100 years or more paying rent to read the letters you wrote but no longer own the access to, you can only rent it, one month at a time and they can take it away at any time for any reason, perhaps because you are not paying enough, so how high will that rent go, you can guarantee it will go up, just as you can guarantee upgrades will slow to a crawl.

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    Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen