Microsoft Office was first released in 1990, and aside from Windows, it’s probably the Microsoft product the general public has the most experience with. Individual apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook will all continue to exist, but starting now, the Office brand name these apps have all been grouped under will begin to go away, to be replaced by “Microsoft 365”.
I’m fairly certain this will turn out like Facebook calling itself Meta now, or Google technically being a part of Alphabet – everybody will continue to use the old, established name indefinitely.
I do wonder if LibreOffice will follow suit and rename itself to Libre 365. On a more serious note. Although i don’t use Microsoft Office i do find it strange that Microsoft decided to kill off such strong brand.
My guess is that they are trying to impulse the subscription based model,
Will they change the name every four years then? Or do they imply that Office will not work on the 29th of feb?
Microsoft really wants to push the subscription model to the point of neglecting their perpetual volume license versions. For instance if you check the “Browsers used by Office Add-ins” article you’ll see that Microsoft has left all commercial/volume license version of Office 2013, Office 2016, and Office 2019 using Internet Explorer 11 rather then edge. So a product like Office 2019 that has years of support left uses a browser that is no longer under support. Basically all modern add-ins now require Edge backed outlook versions. For instance CRMs that are heavily outlook based now say since IE is no longer supported their add-ins will no longer function. We had to spend a lot of money early to replace office volume licenses with years of support left.
What did you expect? Subscription revenue is consistent and predictable but releasing a new version of the software and waiting for people to upgrade isn’t. I mean, why try to convince users to upgrade to a newer version when you can simply tell them they’ll have to pay a certain amount each month to even have access to the software? If there are no good alternatives, they will pay up. “Do you want the ability to open OOXML files that other Microsoft Office users have sent you with guaranteed compatibility? Pay up.”
At least Microsoft will still sell you a perpetual version of Office 2021. Adobe Photoshop is subscription-only in the Creative Cloud (also, why every time I type “Creative Cloud” I am thinking of someone trying to rip farts in new creative ways?)
About the IE issue, IE is unsupported but still functional in Windows, so what prevents the add-ins from working?
Thats it, back to wordperfect for me.
The way I read this, they’re getting rid of the standalone versions of Office finally, so presumably the only way to get Office in the future will be through the 365 program.
Funny enough I bought MS Office for pretty cheap for my macbook…. but don’t use it as it is better in my mind to use LibreOffice and not have my documents potentially locked forever in one company’s release cycle.
I bought a code for Microsoft Office 2019 for my sister’s laptop from a shady reseller on G2A (the ones that instruct you to activate by phone) and it worked great. No regrets. Redmond set up their unethical OOXML tollbooth, I bypassed it without giving them a penny.
As for myself, over at work we use LibreOffice, so I have no use for MS Office.