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Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019 (venturebeat.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-about-that dept.

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. SaaS is news? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. 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.
    2. 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...

    3. 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.

  3. 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 Dan+East · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      Better known as 318230.
    2. Re:they are half right........ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:they are half right........ by UnderCoverPenguin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
  4. 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=

    1. Re:Well duh. by Jaime2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  5. 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
  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.

    --
    http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
  7. You mean the thing that is down frequently? by gweihir · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  8. Office 2010 by Holi · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  9. Re:45% of software features are used by Hadlock · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
    moox. for a new generation.