Microsoft To Release a Non-Subscription Office Suite in 2021 (engadget.com) 91
In a blog post announcing the next version of its Exchange Server, Microsoft has slipped in a single line that's bound to make those who hate paying subscription fees for Office apps happy. From a report: "Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021," the tech giant's Exchange team wrote, confirming that a new version of Office you can purchase with a one-time payment is coming next year. The company has been pushing Microsoft 365 for years now as the main way to get its Office apps. This subscription-based version of its suite gives you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other apps for a monthly payment. While you can use some of those apps for free online with a Microsoft account, you won't be able to install them on your PC like you'd be able to if you pay for a subscription. Further reading: Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019.
Pricing (Score:4, Interesting)
The low-end of Office365 is priced similarly, over 3 years, to the purchase of the Office Suite. With the subscription you not only get updates but a bunch of online services too. I know for our company it made sense to go with the subscription over the straight purchase. Though I do like perpetual licenses and would go with that if we didn't find value in the extra services.
Re:Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet Office 2010 got 10 years of security updates. So if you divide that up over 10 years, that works out to about $2/mo. for the Office Home & Business equivalent.
Really, Office 2010 is more than adequate for most of my use. It all comes down to whether you have enough users to benefit from the online services.
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depends also if you get documents from customers that 2010 can't handle. Support for 2010 quits next month too
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The last major document format change was in 2007. Formatting / appearance differences can happen between Windows/Mac/Online - even on the current version. That's why they have PDF export built in now.
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Depends on business but clients won't want pdf for editing; and there are big changes, what my employer would consider "major" happened in 2013 and beyond
https://support.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
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PDF is just for sharing the finished work - why people even do that in Word is silly. 2013 happens to be the version I use, but I don't touch any of the new-to-office features. Most use of Word/Excel isn't nearly that complex - I could jump to LibreOffice without missing anything. Office 2013 is still more than 7 years into its support window.
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Plenty of business has no notion of "finished work", ongoing revisions to docs are done by collaboration and so no one wants a PDF, ever
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Sharing externally, you don't want a 3rd party to be easily able to modify.
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hahah, yes WE do, depends what business you are talking about. We hired those consultanting firms to do just that.
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You're what is called "the exception that proves the rule," and it should be obvious to you that your office has very different needs than other offices, because you have experience with it. You even hired a consulting firm, because you know you handle documents differently than most companies. If you were doing something even within the normal range, you wouldn't have needed a consultant for it.
You're just intellectually dishonest, and you want to insist you're A Special Child for some reason, even though
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You're what is called "the exception that proves the rule,"
That is not what "the exception that proves the rule" means.
This is an example of what it does mean: if you see a sign saying "parking prohibited on Sunday" then that is the exception which proves the rule that parking is allowed on all other days.
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No. You just are ignorant of the many many kinds of businesses that can exist. There are hundreds of businesses like my employer, and by the way mine happens to have revenue of over a billion dollars a year. You are assuming everyone is like you. Don't
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No. You just are ignorant of the many many kinds of businesses that can exist.
Sure, right, that is something you might have been able to observe! Oh, wait.
LOL durrr!
Yeah, sure, that might be it!
You didn't even notice who you're speaking at, that's why you blurted out something so stupid.
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Who I'm speaking to? Someone with a URL in their profile with http:/// [http] in front? Seems you're ignorant of a lot of things. Here's a quarter kid, get yourself an SSL cert for your basement business.
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Why would you want a Word document? Each version of Word randomly permutes the contents. Use some sort of markup language and git. Word is garbage and has been for decades.
Re:Pricing (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you want a Word document? Each version of Word randomly permutes the contents. Use some sort of markup language and git. Word is garbage and has been for decades.
Word is widespread not because it's a good format but because it's ... well, widespread. Just like with spoken languages, it's not that English is the best language. However, it's the most widely spoken language (counting primary and secondary languages) in the world because there are so many people already using it. Esperanto might be better constructed, but if no one you know uses it, then it's not very useful.
Support LibreOffice. It's free and excellent. (Score:5, Informative)
LibreOffice [libreoffice.org] is free. I moved to LibreOffice a long time ago, when Microsoft Office corrupted one of its own files, and was not able to open it. LibreOffice opened it; I didn't lose what I had written.
LibreOffice makes PDF files with active Internet links. It is available in MANY languages.
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I try every year and within hours I get complaints of rendering problems or missing functions. :(
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Libre office has gotten good enough that I was finally able to switch over from windows with a Linux vm to just Linux on my desk.
Opening scientific papers, track changes with comments and markup works perfectly now, which was the thing I needed.
Otherwise, we moved from local exchange severs to office365, so I can just get all my outlook requiring email/scheduling stuff done in the web interface.
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I want a PDF always. A word format doc is painful. A word doc is bigger, Word is buggy as hell, it is badly supported on Mac (seriously, how can they screw that up), and it's difficult to use.
2008 forever (Score:3)
I _bought_ a copy of the 2008 version after seeing the new UI, and with a plug-in or two it still works for shared editing.
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Office 2003 even had a compatibility tool, that allowed you to open the newer Docx formats as well.
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depends also if you get documents from customers that 2010 can't handle. Support for 2010 quits next month too
You could always just open it in LibreOffice and save it again in 2010 format.
This isn't 1997, the open source office programs handle all the formats.
If you want MS Office, it isn't because it can handle files nobody else can.
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And yet Office 2010 got 10 years of security updates. So if you divide that up over 10 years, that works out to about $2/mo. for the Office Home & Business equivalent.
Really, Office 2010 is more than adequate for most of my use. It all comes down to whether you have enough users to benefit from the online services.
User quantities hardly matter when you're still buying hundreds of bells and whistles that no one will use.
Office 2010 is probably more than adequate for 99.999% of users. Peddling bullshit features no one asked for has been the software (and hardware) model for years now, and Microsoft is hardly alone.
It's one thing to pay a reasonable price for a car to drive yourself to work every day. It's another matter entirely if you're buying a 44-passenger bus every time.
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User quantities hardly matter when you're still buying hundreds of bells and whistles that no one will use.
My point is that most of the online services in the subscription version relate to collaboration and are mostly useless for a standalone user.
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Ya, but with cars you don't have people who scratch their heads in confusion and ask "I don't get it, how come you don't drive a Ford?" or "you should have double-clutched on that hill, it's the state of the art!"
Re:Pricing (Score:4, Informative)
Really, Office 2010 is more than adequate for most of my use. It all comes down to whether you have enough users to benefit from the online services.
For home use, Office 95 probably covered everything...
I used to buy the new (academic) versions of Office as they came out. But with 2019, our university decided to not offer the perpetual home-use package - so I decided to see what would happen if I didn’t get anything. It turns out, we did just fine without a paid Office license. I thought there’d be a pain point with my wife, but she was perfectly happy using Apple’s apps or Google Docs. Plus there’s always LibreOffice.
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And if you want to have Exchange, then what is your monthly price?
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$4/mo. with Exchange Online (Plan 1)
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I meant in your no cloud service scenario, with Office 2010 perpetual. Exchange is pretty pricey but its included in many/most of the subscription plans. Its cloud services like Exchange that make Office365 a great value.
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It's not a no-cloud service scenario - just none bundled. You can buy standalone office and use it with the $4/mo. standalone Exchange Online plan. And those paired, you're still paying the equivalent of about $6/mo. over 10 years instead of $12.50.
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I had to move away from 2010 and onto 2017 or whatever it is because Outlook and Exchange stopped talking with one another and it was getting annoying (you could fix it using a "repair" but it was becoming a regular thing). Those who upgraded to a later version had no problems at all, so in the end I was forced to upgrade out of necessity.
Exchange was updated because the ancient version we were using (seriously, was like 2003 or 2008) fell out of support and we had to update (which was just as well because
Re: Pricing (Score:2)
I'm still using Office 2011 on a MacBook Pro I bought in 2008, which had a permanent licence (bought at academic pricing too). Performance, functionality and document compatibility have not been an issue. I really can't see much additional value in the Office 365 apps on my work laptop, and certainly nothing that would justify the years of the continuous cost of a subscription. In fact for a large period of the intervening time, Excel 2016 and later versions had less functionality and poorer performance
Re:Pricing (Score:4, Interesting)
However what major feature change have we gotten in the Core Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access) That isn't in Office 2003, or Even Office 95?
I had a legacy piece of software the needed Office 95 to run. Which we put in its own virtual server. I have never seen Office open and Run so fast. And truth be told, the only things that are really missing that at least I use for work, are some updated graphics (Anti-aliasing, Transparencies, shadows)
There isn't anything really wrong using software beyond its support life cycle. But you do need to make sure the rest of the system is very secure, as security fixes will no longer happen.
The service model vs just buying it upfront. It is like Leasing a Car vs just buying it. If you plan to keep the car for a few years then trade it in. You are better off leasing it. If you are going to drive it to the ground or for 6 years. (enough to have a year or two of no payments) then you are better off driving your old car.
For a lot of companies, The subscription is better, because they are interested in having the system upgraded. However if their business doesn't need feature updates all that often, then they should be able to buy licences, and use them until they are no security updates, or even a bit further if needed.
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When you have Office 365, you can upload say Excel documents to the Sharepoint then in Sharepoint you can have multiple people editing a spreadsheet at the same time. Now the online version of Excel does not support the full feature set but its very useful to have more than one simultaneous editor. This is new since 2010.
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This stuff is disasterous. The online documents default to being in an edit view when you open them, and it auto-saves on each and every keystroke or mouse click. Thus if I read a document and do nothing else, it still thinks that I have edited the document and my mine is attached as the last editor. Even if I accidentally hit a key, then undo it, I get marked as the editor. It's really frustrating. My preference now is to download a document and use it there, and if I have changes to make I write them
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The size of your business matters. Cloud exchange is fine for under about 1000 employees. When you get above 1000 users, you are spending more time negotiating with Microsoft for fixes and changes you need, that could take a lot less time for you to do it yourself if you could. As well you can have traffic staying on your internal network, and not the Internet. Which for over 1k employees is a lot of external traffic.
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I think the break even point is much lower than 1000 users, maybe as low as 100 users if some assumptions hold true.
One, you've already got server CALs for Windows Server. Two, you've got a virtualized computing infrastructure with the storage and CPU headroom to add in an Exchange server. Three, you have competent admins with some Exchange experience and a good backup environment.
In my experience, most organizations over 100 and under 1000 are like this. It really comes down to the one-time licensing co
What, they're throwing in the towel? (Score:4, Informative)
In a blog post announcing the next version of its Exchange Server, Microsoft has slipped in a single line that's bound to make those who hate paying subscription fees for Office apps happy.
What, they're going to stop trying and let LibreOffice win? That WOULD make me happy. Then I'd never have to touch Microsoft Office again.
The only version of Microsoft Office I need is '97. My disc is still good... Maybe someday LibreOffice Calc will have reasonable keyboard behavior, and decent import from clipboard, and then I won't even need that any more.
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Having worked with Both Office and LibreOffice. Office does its own different sets of annoying copy and paste, between applications as well (Eg when sharting SQL Code from SQL Server Management Studio to say your email, your formatting goes out the window, unless you replace tabs with spaces in the SQL Server settings.). Copy and Paste in general is mizerable across all OS's and Applications.
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What, they're going to stop trying and let LibreOffice win? That WOULD make me happy. Then I'd never have to touch Microsoft Office again.
LibreOffice is the stand-alone office suite of the '90s.
Microsoft positions MS Office as part of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. Mobile. Desktop. Server. HIPPA compliance for the medical office? Not a problem. Integration with a gazillion look-alike/ work-alike apps, plug-ins and templates? Also not a problem.
If you are an office manager and have a slot that needs to be filled today you'll not have the least trouble finding someone who fluent in MS Office. It is a ma
Re: What, they're throwing in the towel? (Score:2)
A marketable skill? More like an expected skill.
Not that it matters to me. I use LibreOffice, I produce documents every day, and no one I work with has ever noticed or cared. Only neanderthals who use macros in Office are truly shackled to it.
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Re:Worse than 2010 (Score:4, Informative)
You're missing the $249.99 Office Home & Business - which includes Outlook. The $149.99 version isn't even licensed for commercial use.
OneNote is included with both. But like 365, it's either the 2016 desktop release or the updated UWP version. There is no 2019 regular desktop version.
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You're missing the $249.99 Office Home & Business - which includes Outlook.
Outlook - the worst email client in the world! Hooray!
Burn it.
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Outlook is far from my personal favorite, but I don't set business users up on Thunderbird. It at least has a full feature set. Most of its problems come down to handling Gmail's horrendous IMAP and the badly coded iCloud addon for the people that rely on that.
Personally, I use Thunderbird on Windows and Apple Mail on Mac.
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StarWritter, StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibraOffice has gotten a lot better over time.
However what I feel was a real shame was the decline of Wordperfect suites.
They were working on Wordperfect for Linux which was really good, then they made WordPerfect 2000 for Linux which was pure garbage. They basically took the windows version a version of Wine. And they fixed the code in both WP and Wine until the App rudemartarly ran. It ran like crap compared to the previous version which was a Unix port to Linux. Tha
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Worth noting that the $149 bundle is the only bundle Microsoft offers, and for 2019 at least doesn't include two applications, OneNote and Outlook, that their $149 package for 2010 did. How much does Outlook cost? $139 [microsoft.com], making it a tough sell over something like Thunderbird (which isn't exactly faultless - they broke some SSL IMAP configurations in the last release for instance and appear to be in no hurry to fix it) or generic web mail.
They really, really, really, don't want you to do anything other than subscribe. Meanwhile LibreOffice is getting better and better and they're working on a web version...
There's very little point in including OneNote and Outlook as both of them are pretty pointless without a server and the overlap between home users that are capable of running their own server and home users that choose Microsoft products is probably pretty slim.
Indeed (Score:2)
" those who hate paying subscription fees for Office apps"
You mean LibreOffice-users?
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Happy with that sentence, "editor" ? (Score:1)
Not a bad decision by Microsoft (Score:3)
Pricing, needs, wants, expectations, prejudices and personal preferences all factor in for almost every purchase individuals and organizations make, including software. Hopefully, by offering a non-subscription Office option, Microsoft is admitting the cloud, and software as subscription, are not the one-size-fits-all options too many vendors have committed to.
Subscriptions can make sense if you (or your organization) will make good use of the add-ons and extra from the subscription service, and you do not plan to commit to the version long-term. Of course, you have to be willing to use, and depend, on cloud-based applications.
Many organizations (and individuals) tend to commit to a version until it is no longer supported. Add in some discomfort with depending on the cloud/online instead of the desktop/laptop. Cost comes into play as well: as mentioned by omnichad there is a much lower cost per year (over 7 to 10 years of active life) versus the subscription model. To date, Microsoft still offers ten (10) years of extended support for their software, so an active life of up to 10 years is not an unreasonable expectation.
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MS have made licensing a bear with office.
If you buy at the retail level, the key you get is not the key that MS assigns you once you, which requires a personal email address as you you can only have 5 licenses tied to one email preventing licences@mycorp.com being used. And if you don’t capture the new licence key generated during sig up, good luck, because ms registry will only give you the last 5 digits. They make it deliberately hard to force you on SA at twice the price or O365.
Someone's gotta ask... (Score:3)
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Office 95 still works fine in Windows 10 [thurrott.com]
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Modern perpetual versions get about 10 years of updates. Office 95 predates the whole "everything is connected to the Internet and we'll look terrible if we leave huge security flaws open."
Office 95 probably requires some compatibility settings on the setup executable to get it to put things in the right places. Nothing significant enough that the linked article makes any mention of any trouble.
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does Microsoft still support Office 95, e.g., security updates?
You know the answer to that--it's the same answer as to the question "Does Slack still support Slackware 2.1 e.g. security updates?"
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"Perpetual license" means "you have the right to use this forever," It does not mean "you have the right to get free support from us for as long as you want."
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So then, "perpetual" is not really perpetual. That's what I thought.
Stop shifting the goalposts.
The question is about a perpetual LICENSE, not perpetual SUPPORT. You have a copy of Office '95, per this thread. Have you given Microsoft any additional money since your initial expenditure for it? Was there an indication that your issues running it were due to a license expiration, or technological enforcement thereof. No, and no. THAT is what a perpetual license is, and why it's important.
MS isn't writing patches for it anymore, so it's not "supported". They're also not stoppi
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People who purchased a license to Vista got a perpetual license too, but if they want to use that license to perform an "upgrade install" of windows XP, it won't work because microsoft disabled the server which controls that function.
I suspect that if you disable the update server components or block them on your firewall, the "perpetual license" office 2019 and coming 2021 will both stop functioning.
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I'm glad you were able to get that working. I know from experience that if you try to install "normal" office 2016, on a computer with standard microsoft configurations today it will instead download office 365 with some 2016 logos ported onto it and force association with Microsoft accounts.
I expect there's a workaround to this behavior and it might be as simple is keeping your system disconnected from the internet, but it's unreasonable to expect this for normal users who would rather avoid Microsoft's h
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Re: Someone's gotta ask... (Score:2)
Yeah, my perpetual license of Office 2011 is broken by activation problems. So long as I don't replace any of the hardware it's running on, it will keep going. The hardware will die at some point though. Office 97 and older didn't use an online activation method, so so much easier to reinstall or transfer to another machine.
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I still use Office 2003 (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't use office much and my work gives me access to this online office suite, but apart of a couple of interesting features Excel added, the Office 2003 on an old VM I have since grad school 15 years ago is actually much snappier and - especially Word much easier to use. Again, I don't use office much, but it seems that whenever I try do do a word document with some headings/formatting/etc I spend more time fighting with Word than actually entering text. Word 2003 seems to let me control my fonts/settings etc of what I write much better.
Now adobe needs to do the same (Score:5, Insightful)
The adobe subscription is the same way, they need to make it so that you don't lose access to your photos if you can't pay the subscription. The problem is this: these are uncertain times, lets say I lose my job, the first thing that is going to go are all my subscriptions. I'm not a professional photographer, so I then lose access to my photos in lightroom and the ability to work with them in photoshop. I'm not okay with that. I'd rather pay more for the software with a one time fee under the old business model, because it buy's me peace. Companies should be respectful of their customers and run two different pricing models
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It's too bad you can't buy creative cloud apps by like the hour or something, even if the hourly charge was horrendous compared to the typical subscription fee. Like $5/hr would only need 10 hours to hit the monthly subscription price, but I could get away with 2-3 hours a month easy for what I want to use it for.
Hell, I'd even pay a flat fee for a perpetual install of some older revision.
I'm still getting away with running CS3, it does everything I want. I've tried free alternatives, but they're just not
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Will Adobe be next? (Score:2)
Adobe Creative Cloud, is wicked expensive for home and casual users.
I use to buy a version of Photoshop for a bit ofer $1k. Then I would keep it for 3 or 4 years. Then buy the upgrade version for a few hundred dollars. However based on my budget at the time, I could decide to keep the old version for a bit longer. Or buy an older upgrade at a bargain.
Yes this is a company that needs to make money. However Creative Cloud pricing means, I will just not use their software, and deal with products like Gimp.
Worthless (Score:2)
If it's online-only then I'm not interested. It's not 1960 anymore; when I pay for software I expect it to sit on my machine where I can decide if I want to change some fundamental aspect of my workflow rather than wake up one morning and find that the publisher has decided to do it for me.
Too little too late... (Score:2)
When MS moved to a subscription only model for Office a lot of people decided it wasn't a very good deal and went to Google Docs or LibreOffice or other such alternative. Businesses had little choice but to go along with it but home users really need to question the need for a monthly subscription for doing pretty mundane tasks that don't require anything near the complexity of O365.
Personally I switched over to LibreOffice a long time ago and it works fine. Mostly I use it for spreadsheets. I like Outlook
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Your complaint is a little too early. Microsoft never moved to a subscription-only model. You have always had the option of buying it outright. The latest version of Office that you can buy with a perpetual license is Office 2019 [microsoft.com].
Prior to that it was Office 2016, Office 2013, Office 2010, Office 2007, etc.
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Why upgrade? (Score:2)
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You'd better save your downloader or CD's, I tried to do an install on a PC for a friend for 2013 and I couldn't find a downloader anywhere. So if you ever upgrade you PC...
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I actually found that eventually, I punched in my key and it didn't work. I then had to call support to get a link. Regardless the days of being able to find an installer directly from microsoft are gone.
Or... (Score:2)
Home Users (Score:2)
Home users expect that most office programs will be pre-packaged. This has been true since the pre-internet days. So PC manufacturers need to package some sort of office applications so that their PC's are user friendly. Sure, they also install Office, but then Office starts screaming about wanting you to buy a subscription - and the freeware equivalent is already installed!
So Microsoft re-enters the arena with a no-subscription package, hoping to get the PC manufacturers to pre-bundle it, and pass the cost
One time payment (Score:1)
point of story? (Score:2)
Are you listening, Intuit? (Score:2)
And Adobe and everyone else who thinks the rental business model is what customers want. Of course, while we're on the subject, hey Dassault Systeme, it's pretty rude to require people to pay for every upgrade they didn't get.