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.

Comments

Have it your way, MS

[Anonymous Coward]

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

SaaS is news?

[UnknownSoldier]

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?

Re:SaaS is news?

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:SaaS is news?

[kurkosdr]

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...

Re:SaaS is news?

[Solandri]

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.

they are half right........

[wolfie_cr]

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

Re:they are half right........

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:they are half right........

[Dan East]

I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.

Re:they are half right........

[Thelasko]

LibreOffice is perfect for occasional home use, or a student writing a term paper. In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.

The subscription model may be more profitable for Microsoft overall, but I have a hunch it will lose market share for cases that use the software casually. The same users that we hurt when Microsoft abandoned Works in 2009. Microsoft has opened up a nice niche for LibreOffice. Even though it's not as good as MS Office, it's much better than Works ever was.

Re:they are half right........

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:they are half right........

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:they are half right........

[Solandri]

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.

Re:they are half right........

[UnderCoverPenguin]

In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.

At least where I work, nearly all the technical people are using LibreOffice - many of us are using it on Linux, though we all have "office PCs" for access to corporate email and several "business apps" we are forced to use.

Anyway, the MS Office users in the company don't seem to notice. And any compatibility issues they do encounter are no worse than what they encounter in documents from customers and suppliers, who use different versions of MS Office, some as old as 2007. MS Office inter-version is often poor. We usually hear more complaints about outside documents than ones from the tech staff.

Well duh.

[Smidge204]

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=

Re:Well duh.

[Jaime2]

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.

more like rent

[Locutus]

"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.

Re:What is even the appeal of "the cloud"?

[DarkRookie2]

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

No so fast, dude...

[bogaboga]

...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.

Microsoft Tax

[labnet]

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.

You mean the thing that is down frequently?

[gweihir]

So have your employees twiddling their thumbs while MS tries to fix their broken infrastructure? That will go well...

45% of software features are used

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

Re:45% of software features are used

[Hadlock]

With the sole exception of a business case report i had to write for a software package acquisition in...2014? I can't think of the last time I needed a formal word processor. Even then it wasn't strictly necessary.
 
Most of my documents now (2017-2019) are written in markdown, which although there are a couple of competing standards, most parsers can accurately render 99%+ of documents legibly. It's no PDF but is a pretty portable standard.
 
I still use excel-type spreadsheet software to calculate personal finance projects but the sum, average functions are pretty bog standard
 
After that you have what, powerpoint? Depending on company culture you might do 80% of your real work in an app like this...
 
Finally there's the mystery meat fourth app, which might be somethinng like MS Access, or MS Project or... MS Notes? Visio? Who the hell knows, whatever it is, you're probably better off using something else instead.
 
I feel like the word processor is a dead segment, most "documents" I get these days are just well formatted emails, most spreadsheets are generic and interchangable, but powerpoint slideshow apps might be the one vendor lock-in left for office?

I was happy with LibreOffice but went with MS

[williamyf]

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

Office 2010

[Holi]

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.