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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.
I will then not give you any money, for there is no way in hell I am going to pay you a recurrent subscription.
Gee, Software as a Service, aka monthly software rental fees, where Microsoft can nickel and dime you every month is a surprise?
The entire software industry is moving this direction. Adobe, JetBrains, etc.
Why is this news?
actually neither are worth buying for probably higher than 90% of people.........libreoffice all the way
They DMCA people for hosting office 2000 but not 97 or earlier, meaning that 2000 is good enough for people. If you're not doing complicated macros and formulas, you have plenty of legal open source alternatives.
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=
Or LibreOffice. Either do a nice job for most folks.
TeX for the rest of us that need to publish or write very technical detail-oriented documents with multiple authors.
I doubt they will release it.
Just force you to use the shitty 365.
And people will eat it up. They already have enough idiots that have bought. Now that will get the rest.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
31 years and you still can't get it right? You would think at some point you would arrive. Guess with Microsoft it's, "a work in progress."
"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
No one should want it, but Microsoft's marketing budget is at least 10 times their programming budget at this point.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
But unfortunately for us the "march of progress" is pretty much forcing us to upgrade, even when the existing copies of Office 2003 and up work just fine.
We looked at going to Office 365 and the pricing looked good... until we found that needed functionality cost extra. We would end up paying more in less than 2 years going with Office 365 instead of Office 2019. And we would keep paying that out, year after year. Office 2019 could last us many years.
Personally I'd be more than happy to switch to LibreOffice, but that would never fly.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
Microsoft has been pushing Office 365 HARD for some time now. At microsoft.com, you have to do some digging to find anything about Office 2019, and even what you do find is scant. I only keep Microsoft Office around just in case I need 100% compatibility with a MS doc I've received or need to edit and send out. I'll probably buy Office 2019 some time this year, but it will probably be the final time I pay for an office suite. I prefer to use LibreOffice. Not only is the price right and the features meet and exceed all my needs, the UI is more intuitive and obvious.
I'm still on 2007.
Now if they added some features......
...If you're not doing complicated macros and formulas, you have plenty of legal open source alternatives.
That's not entirely right - macros do exist, though in another language.
Open source alternatives suck big time - from the interface to speed to everything else one can imagine.
In short, not worth a try for the majority of [ordinary] users.
That explains why despite being "free" they have no traction to be proud of.
BOO!
Couldn't you link to the products directly.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
... that never happened and it never will.
You're welcome.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
46137
They are smart!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'll never forget the commercials where Microsoft ridiculed their own customers for using their products.
I never went into MS Office willingly to begin with. The Corel office suite was better way back when, and now Libre Office is easier to use and has a better price point.
Screw MS Office.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Them changing the UI is to cover there incompetence and the fact they are not adding anything meaningful to their products.
What else can you stuff into the various programs.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
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 guess people who don't backup their stuff might find it useful. Personally, I trust my el-cheapo Synology NAS a whole heck of a lot more than any cloud.
Try this:
LibreOffice
Apache OpenOffice
Softmaker FreeOffice
WPS Office
(they have a whole office suite, not just the word processor)
Abiword
SoftMaker Office
(again, they have a whole suite, not just the word processor)
Pages (for Mac)
(Apple does other office apps, too, but they don't seem to
market a unified suite)
Atlantis Word Processor
I monitor an email server that is constantly receiving messages from Office 365 users that they didn't knowingly send, but were sent using their compromised accounts. Why would I consider authorizing access to such a "service" within my organization?
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'.
I see the point, the frustration to me is that the reality has produced highly vertically monolithic cloud 'things' rather than federated services.
By and large 'cloud storage' is the key part. Live collaboration on a document is currently only viable through a 'all-in' experience, but there could have been a standard for bidirectional content streaming that applications could have used.
In such a case, hypothetically google suite and ms office could collaborate on the same content live, rather than having to pick which stack.
It particularly annoys me with the volume of electronics that are locked into a cloud vendor and at the whims of that vendor in terms of when that electronic gadget becomes junk (see the Lowes shutdown of their smarthome line that is going to brick all the customers that bought into it)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
NextCloud and rpi FTW
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Why, you may ask?
Well, when I was teaching in the University in 2009, I was Happy with OpenOffice for Mac for my needs. I even had to live through the Great Fork (eventually, went LibreOffice in 2013). Did the class materials in Impress, exams in Writer, used Calc for the calification Sheets (had to use Yed for network diagrams because there was no equivalent to Visio)...
But then, I started to do Technical training for Huawei and Nokia... And guess what?
The class materials were done in PowerPoint, and if you opened them with Impress the formating would go to hell, even if the presentations were done in Office 2003 or 2007! And no one paid me to fix the formating of every!single!slide! *
The report forms were done in Excel, good luck getting the formating and the (very simple) macros to work in Calc. And good luck getting the guys in china/finland to be able to get it back completely right and trasparently in their copy of excel.
The daily assistance templates and example exams were done in word, good luck getting the formating right in writer upon opening, without wasting (unpaid) time wrestling with the formating.
And if you wanted to send some extra material to the trainees that you wanted them to be able to edit, guess what would happen if they tried to open your libreoffice docs in their company supplied copy of office? It was a coin toss if the document would display correctly or not.
So. I went office. But not standalone office for mac. I went office 365 for mac, and also got 1TB of onedrive that I do not use, and a lot of minutes for Skype calling to international phones that comes in handy from time to time, all for a very reasonable bundle price...
Oh, and on top of that, the SW is always on the latest version, pretty good when you get to an audience of very saavy telco trainees, instead of sporting your old copy of office 2007. If there is a problem with formating, the trainees can lay the blame were it belongs: in the guys who did the presentations, not on an old as hell unsupported copy of the SW (or on some very good but not compatible FOSS software).
I still have LibreOffice on my SSD, but I am thinking very seriously to remove it to save space (256GB SSD, with a 100GB Bootcamp/WinVM, had to move my steam library to an SD card**). I'll say that office is slightly better interface wise than LOffice, and MUCH better dictionary wise (specially in spanish). I realy found Open/LibreOffice good enough, but in the end, the circumstances decided against it.
JM2C YMMV
* Actually, that's the reason I declined the work of translating slides from chinglish to Spanish, the translating would break the formating, and you ended up wasting more time redoing the formating, than you got paid for the translaiton (you got paid per word, and very low at that, quite frustrating).
** When I get my next mac, I'll try to move steam to an iSCSI target drive. Moving it to a SMB 3.1 share on my NAS did not work out very well
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Considering I still use my retail 2010 license I can understand why they would prefer to sell the subscription service.
But it's also the same reason I will continue to use 2010.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Well, I don't understand why you need a GUI to write a letter. I'm using troff and layout-wise everything that needs special handling has an associated macro and comes out consistently right with no fuss.
Realistically, the simple answer to redmond's finest popularity is that "everyone" uses redmond's finest because "everyone" is using redmond's finest. And they haven't even the minimal knowledge or skill to even dare try anything else, ever. They've been skillfully kept uninformed and unwilling to become informed by redmond's marketeering.
Now redmond thinks it can make more money pushing people to their SaaS offering and so they'll do exactly that. Whether it is good for anyone else doesn't come into it. Not for them, and not for the uninformed clientele. They'll get this fed to them by redmond's marketeering and they'll bloody well like it, redmond's marketeering will make sure of that.
So the short version is that redmond's customers are puppets, who'll dance as told.
That's not even close to being true.
Microsoft's advertising for 2018 was 1.6 billion. Their R&D for 2018 was almost 15 Billion.
About the only thing you got right was the 10 times, just in the wrong direction.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Their products make it seem otherwise
Also, how much of that $15,000,000,000 was the cloud. I would guess only $160,000,000 went into Windows and Office.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Of course I hardly ever need a word processor anyway.
Really, the main reason I "need" an office suite at all is because some people still insist on using Word for everything - whether it's a simple note that would've been just fine as a plaintext email, or a list of updates they want made on some website page (which is doubly fun if the changes they've provided are for a page on a Wordpress site).
#DeleteChrome
Software that you own can be:
-Transferred
-Sold
-Written off for taxes
Microsoft gets no compensation for this.
Software that is rented generates a more predictable revenue stream. Also, with analytics, they can mine valuable data, and use your bandwidth as they see fit.
Expect more software to use the "small monthly fee" model.
Many of the state agencies I know - software-as-service is an absolute non-starter.
They want to be able to cut a check, get the software, end of discussion.
Reoccurring monthly/yearly charges (with the exception of things like web hosting) are dead on arrival.
I agree. For the past seven years or so, I've been downloading LibreOffice.
To prove Office 2019 isn't worth buying -- you and your company should go with LibreOffice/LaTeX instead
FTFY, and done.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Damn, stack ranking is getting cutthroat!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I won't buy Office 2019.
Huh?
No, nobody said anything about getting 365, why?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As you surmise, buying and renting are the same thing in the long-term. If you pay $200 for Office and upgrade to a new version every 5 years, you're paying the same as renting it for $40/yr. So in terms of cost, there's really no difference between buying and renting. If you buy a car for $30k, use it for 5 years, and sell it for $15k, you've paid the same as leasing it for $250/mo. Whether the subscription price is better or worse just depends on the price points and how often you normally upgrade. Office 365 is a bit overpriced IMHO (since most people only need Word and Excel). But Adobe Creative Cloud for Photography (Lightroom + Photoshop) is pretty close to what I was paying to keep Lightroom and Photoshop updated (Adobe actually adds useful new features which make upgrading compelling, like a better healing brush, better noise reduction, filter to fix focus or camera shake).
The real difference is on Microsoft's end. If they sell copies of software, they have to keep separate teams to maintain Office 2019, Office 2016, Office 2013, Office 2010 - for however many years until they EOL it and discontinue support. OTOH if they offer only a subscription, they can just drop the teams supporting Office 2010, 2013, and 2016, and force everyone to upgrade to the 2019 version. I ran across the downside of this recently. A client's custom software which ran fine on Windows 7 and early versions of Windows 10, would no longer work on current versions of Windows 10. There's no way to revert back to an earlier build of Windows 10 (Microsoft drops support after about 9 months and forces you to upgrade). So the client had to pay to have their custom software modified so it'd work on the current version of Windows 10.
Still don't understand why people buy into the SaaS model of closed source for exorbitant fees.
Maybe because those of us who use these things know, especially the oft trotted out Adobe stuff, that it's actually cheaper. I use PhotoShop for photo editing, and simply can't get used to GIMPS interface, especially years ago before they had the dockable windows. I've used PhotoShop since 7.0 came out.
I used to upgrade ~2 versions of PhotoShop, because there are things being integrated into the newer versions that make my job easier. With CC over the same amount of time I save $100+. I also get LightRoom for "free". You know, LightRoom, the program made specifically for photos, AND I also get PhotoShop for the super heavy edits. For cheaper.
As a trade off I have to ensure my PC is connected to the internet every couple months. Boo hoo, I'm sure the PC will never ever be connected to the internet /s
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
You can't use O365 for legally restricted documents, ie HIPPA, FERPA, ITAR, many court documents, company secrets, etc. In particular, ITAR (military research) documents must not leave the country, and you have no idea where MS is replicating it. You probably also shouldn't use it for stuff you just don't want to risk leaking to the internet.
Whoops, with all the cutting and pasting, I did one wrong:
WPS Office
Seriously. Why would I ever *want* this cloud bullshit? Even if we disregard all the horrible security and privacy problems, what is the actual *upside* that is so appealing? I simply don't understand it. There is no upside.
For a company? Mostly a standard service to a standard price. I've seen this now many, many times there's a huge internal negotiation between the business users and internal IT and whether their staffing demands are too high, service levels too low, required uptime and so on. Sometimes they're inefficient, sometimes the business demands are just unreasonable, but back and forth it goes. So you buy a SaaS solution like Microsoft 365 and it's like this is what you're getting, end of story. You can be happy or unhappy about it but it's the same service level as millions of others so STFU and get back to work. Or make the business case that we should switch to Google Docs but stop fussing. In a big company it's like we can hire you or we can hire a company that'll hire you, either way you don't have any particular loyalty to us we're just a paycheck. It's laws and getting fired that keep you from misusing our data and it's the same either way.
For personal users? Mostly laziness. I don't want to manage my computer or my files, I just want to log in and all my documents are there and I have the latest version of the software. The sales pitch for a SaaS solution is that there's no reason to save up improvements/fixes to make people buy new versions, you just keep on continuously improving the service. Whether that's true or it's free rent, well... maybe a bit of both? You can take a look at Photoshop CC now as we have 5+ years of history, they're improving things but of course for a lot of people any version is overkill. Oh and of course users rarely care about more privacy than they get in the SLA, most people are going to upload it to Facebook or Instagram afterwards. They're not too worried about the NSA snooping through their photo album...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019
Done, I won't. I'm still never going to sign up for any software as a service. Currently running office 2013 on Windows 7. I'm not sure what I'll do when Win7 support is dropped though. But buying into subscription software won't be it.
Office 365 on Android tablets, iPads or in a browser.
The market has spoken; consumers don't want to abandon their primary OS just to run an office suite. And MS learned the hard way by betting the farm on Windows Phone and their stillborn UWP-based Windows Store for desktop.
Microsoft are now emphasising the cloud and transitioning their customers away from Windows via their WSL offering whilst abandoning their own web browser tech for a half-arsed Chrome clone. Windows is now a platform for legacy software and high end gamers who demand better performance than an XBox can provide.
The Adobe argument has been rehashed for years. It is cheaper IF you were one of the few people or organizations that purchased every update.
Their rental program offers each program for about $10-$20 per month, purchased in year increments. $10 per month for Photoshop & Lightroom means $120/year. If you get the suite, it is $600 per year. With the old costs back in CS5 and CS6 days, if you purchased the near-yearly updates then it was cheaper. Few people and businesses bought upgrades that often.
Most individuals would wait for years between updates (assuming they paid for it at all, which is probably the real reason for the change). As a personal example, I went from CS3 released in 2007 to CS6 from 2012. For about $200 I used great software for five years, or about $3.33 per month versus $50 per month. True I didn't get the cutting-edge bugs, but I didn't have a need for them.
I still use CS6 from 2012 for everything except Lightroom, which I now must rent to keep up with camera file formats. That saves me about $500 each year.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
More bullshit. Screw them. Use OpenOffice or Libre Office or anything other than their bullshit.
Works great, can run LibreOffice on any platform.
The use case of a business crucially depending on one specific piece of paid-for software is far more common than you think.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Have you pay monthly fee forever or pay once. Duh everyone wants someone to pay forever! What Microsoft does not want you to know is that Office 2007 and 2010 are still in VERY active and in service and there is NO need to upgrade. Why buy Office 2013, 2016 or 2019 when what you have works. Why subscribe and pay forever when the older versions work just fine? Oh yeah they want more money. Duh!
Probable best to encourage people to move to Open Standards, which is something the British Government is doing right: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov...
Microsoft objected, when the British Government first mentioned they might: https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
The online version of Excell, Word and outlook really suck compaired to the offline version. very slow, a lot of visual updating problems (or mostly just missing a lot of options).
Now I am a user of LibreOffice and Linux but up until around 2004 I was quite happy using Microsoft Word 2.0, released in 1991. had it continued to work on newer Windows versions I would no doubt still be using it. Although, as it did not work it gave me the opportunity to find out what else was out there. That's when I discovered the world of Open Source and abandoned Windows entirely with Windows XP being the last version I used in production. My computing has been a lot less stress free since.
The amount of toil expended deploying office makes it worth the switch to 365. Everyone on here knows the epic level of incompetence demonstrated by your average Windows admin but they seem to forget that these are the same people trying to admin and deploy AD, Office, Exchange, and Skype. Can't sign me up for 365 fast enough after witnessing that buggered collection of keystone cop moments.
No one should want it, but Microsoft's marketing budget is at least 10 times their programming budget at this point.
And it needs to be for any successful business. Word of mouth rarely spreads beyond a bunch of geeks.
Is it the year of Linux on desktop yet?
Not until it can play games.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
I could have, and almost did, but it was easier to just copy/paste the links from the site from which I found them. I liked how the linked pages gave screenshots and explanation about the product. Didn't think anyone would have been upset about information.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I recently had to set up a spreadsheet app on a family member's tablet.
I thought the obvious solution was some free open source office suit akin to Open/Libre Office. I personally haven't used MS Office for well over a decade. But Microsoft's Mobile/cloud based solution is literally a no funny business, no nonsense direct port of the Application you used in High school (or college, or your job). It does not try to reinvent the wheel for mobile, it does not strip out 99% of the functionality to make it simpler, it just works exactly as you remember that it should on desktop or mobile.
I have yet to see a port of a desktop app that was half as good as excel for Office 365. Then when I had to troubleshoot a problem with spreadsheet code, I was able to just hope onto the browser based solution from my desktop, and it just worked exactly how you would want it to.
I could see it being a very good solution for a business who wanted people on desktops and mobile devices modifying and reading the same document. But I imagine they work together well as it is not only the same UI, but the same file format from what I have seen.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"... no way ... I am going to pay you for a subscription."
Answer: LibreOffice is free.
Google Documents might not be for everyone, but it has been fine for our company of ~30. Great for collaboration, sharing settings easy to tweak for integration with other software (Trello is my go-to).
I prefer Google Sheets over Excel, mainly because with the companies we work with, uploading data to cross-reference in Excel is going to be met with an immediate scientific notation explosion. Just leave my data alone until I format it!
If Microsoft is going to push you to go online-only, why not use Google Documents if you are able to instead? I think MS should be careful about this. Office 365 is inferior to the desktop versions. The "features" that people need (keeping them from using GD or Libre/OO) are often missing from the 365 version anyway. If you force people away from the desktop versions, they may just hire a proper program to build them applications instead of trying to run a company out of an excel sheet with macros.