IT

Office 2019 Has Arrived. Here’s Why You Probably Won’t Care.

Author: Walter Glenn / Source: How-To Geek

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the availability of Office 2019 to volume licensing customers, promising general retail availability in the coming weeks. Unless you’re a business customer looking to upgrade and you’re not ready to move your Office life to the cloud, this probably won’t matter to you.

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What is Office 2019?

Office 2019 is the stand-alone, perpetual license version of Office. It’s just like Office was in the days before the subscription-based Office 365 was in play. You make a one time purchase, and you get to keep on using it as long as you want—on one PC or Mac. The consumer version, Office Home & Business 2019, isn’t available yet, but Microsoft has announced the price—$249.

That sounds okay. Why not avoid a subscription fee for Office 365 and buy a perpetual license? Well, there are a few reasons.

Microsoft Is Clearly Downplaying Office 2019

That screenshot above is from Microsoft’s Office 2019 landing page, and it starts right off with equivocating language: “For customers who aren’t ready for the cloud” is partly straight talk and partly subtle dark pattern manipulation. Microsoft clearly designed Office 2019 as a stop gap for companies that aren’t ready to move to a subscription-based model. Fair enough. But it also starts digging at you a little bit and making it clear that you’re missing out if you’re not going with Office 365.

Scroll down a bit past two whole feature points (“create with ease” and “simplify your work”), and you get to this:

Not trying real hard to sell us on the whole Office 2019 deal, are they?

The truth is that back in May, Microsoft decided to freeze the code for Office 365—a continually updated subscription version of Office—and issue that as Office 2019. It doesn’t even have all the features that Office 356 has right now, just a subset of those features.

It’s pretty clear that going forward, Microsoft is considering Office 365 the real version and Office 2019 pretty much an afterthought required for customers that have resisted the subscription model.