Home Microsoft Don’t lose your money on Office 2019 (says Microsoft)
Microsoft - December 17, 2023

Don’t lose your money on Office 2019 (says Microsoft)

Don’t lose your money on Office 2019 (says Microsoft) 1

We’ve all had a chortle on the price of Microsoft Office, with the ’90s debuts of Bob and Clippy being in particular hilarious (at the least in hindsight). But now it is Microsoft itself that is making a laugh of Office 2019, the contemporary version of its iconic workplace suite. Although Office 2019 turned into just launched this past September, Microsoft is urging you to replace it — and your older versions of Office — with Office 365.

And it’s not simply in Microsoft’s “Twins Challenge” commercials. Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice chairman for Office and Windows institution, comes right out and says that Office 2019’s applications are “frozen in time. They don’t ever get updated with new capabilities,” whilst “Office 365 consists of completely mounted Office applications … And those apps preserve getting better over time, with new skills brought each month.”

Wait, what took place to Office carrier packs? Well, it seems there gained’t be any.

I’m positive the road of users wanting to sign up for those “new talents” is already forming. Or maybe not. What exactly can you upload to an workplace suite nowadays, anyway? As a long way as I’m involved, the closing profitable “new skills” got here with Office 2003. In the software industry, a sixteen-yr drought for killer apps turned into once inconceivable.

What does Microsoft’s advertising push in opposition to itself mean? It approaches that it is shifting from being a product company to being a service employer. Microsoft doesn’t need to sell you bits on a floppy, CD, DVD or download anymore. Instead, it wishes you to lease service from it all the time and a day.

office-suite-ecosystem-670x335.jpg (670×335)

It’s been coming for a while. Back in 2015, I mentioned that Microsoft made only 10% of its revenue from Windows income. In Microsoft’s remaining sector, Microsoft mentioned that its Office sales extended eleven%, which become pushed by Office 365 Commercial sales boom of 34%. Microsoft is persevering with to move its business version too in which the cash is. And the money is in cloud-based offerings.

You can see this in what would possibly first look to you like unrelated developments. First, Microsoft gave up on growing its Edge internet browser. It’s changing Edge’s internals with Google’s open-source Chromium code.

Second, Microsoft is cutting off guide for Internet Explorer (IE) 10 years earlier than predicted. And, even extra tremendous, Microsoft senior cybersecurity architect Chris Jackson actually blogged that Microsoft needs you to stop the usage of IE and begin the use of “modern-day” browsers instead. And what are present-day browsers? They’re Chrome-primarily based browsers.

The upshot: Microsoft no longer cares in case you’re the usage of Microsoft bits in your computer. It needs you to apply archrival Google’s Chrome rather. Heck, a Microsoft net developer instructed Mozilla’s developers on Twitter that they should throw within the towel on Firefox in choose of Chromium.

Why? Because, searching in advance, Microsoft desires to cash in on services and no longer products. That’s one of the reasons why Microsoft has been embracing open-source software program. Not best is that in which its organization customers are actually however in case you’re supplying offerings rather than applications, you don’t care so much about having control of the bits. What you care about is turning in first-rate offerings that will maintain customers coming. And that’s what Microsoft thinks it has in Office 365.

The subsequent herbal step from right here is Windows as a provider. I don’t understand whilst Microsoft will in the end transfer over to a Chrome OS-style Windows, but I do know it’s coming.

I am, inside the period in-between, positive we received’t ever see some other standalone version of Office. It’s achieved.

Check Also

Harnessing the power of analytics for business decision making

Today, business is running at a faster pace than ever before. It is also competitive, and …