Only Plebs Use Office 2019 over Office 365, Says Microsoft's Weird New Ad Campaign

[nilepez]

It really depends. If you buy 2019 today you get almost 7 years of support for 150 (I'm assuming home/student)

If you need 5 copies, then it's 750 for 7 years of use.
If you go with 365 you get almost 11 years for 6 seats.

Personally, I'd probably buy plain old office, but if you need more than 3 licenses 365 is the way to go (and a year from now, 365 would make more sense even for that use case).

 

[nilepez]

Meh?

Why would you need your Office package to be constantly upgraded?

I'm still using Office 2010 at home, and I'm not missing any features from newer versions. Heck, the only reason I'm not still using Office 2000, is because back in 2010 I took advantage of the Home Use Program (HUP) at my employer and paid $9.95 for Office 2010 Professional Plus.

So I paid $9.95 once and it is still good today, 9 years later.

If Office 365 had existed this entire time, and I had paid for it every year, I would have paid ~$900 for the privilege of using Office.

That's only ~100 times more. Why would I do that?

The newest versions of Office offer me literally nothing I want that I can't already do with my 2010 version.

Microsoft must take people for fools.

Agreed, but I doubt we'll get 2019 (or whatever is out) for 10 bucks. It'll be 150. If I still need 3 seats, then I'll get 365 for a year or 2 and when the next version of Office is released, I'll buy copies of plain old Office.

 

[Lakados]

Meh?

Why would you need your Office package to be constantly upgraded?

I'm still using Office 2010 at home, and I'm not missing any features from newer versions. Heck, the only reason I'm not still using Office 2000, is because back in 2010 I took advantage of the Home Use Program (HUP) at my employer and paid $9.95 for Office 2010 Professional Plus.

So I paid $9.95 once and it is still good today, 9 years later.

If Office 365 had existed this entire time, and I had paid for it every year, I would have paid ~$900 for the privilege of using Office.

That's only ~100 times more. Why would I do that?

The newest versions of Office offer me literally nothing I want that I can't already do with my 2010 version.

Microsoft must take people for fools.

Depends what features you are using, file share reports, offline file lock down, AES 256 encryption, integrated SharePoint, self destructing files, user hierarchy levels and sensitivity settings and sharing policies that go with it. Then on the Exchange side you’ve got all that plus hosted ADFS, VPN tunnels, access to hosted servers, Teams, Dynamics, a crap load of others I could list and won’t. But best of all privacy guarantees, they meet a lot of security requirements for Enterprise and Government that nobody else compares to.

 

[Lakados]

Agreed, but I doubt we'll get 2019 (or whatever is out) for 10 bucks. It'll be 150. If I still need 3 seats, then I'll get 365 for a year or 2 and when the next version of Office is released, I'll buy copies of plain old Office.

If your business or school has an O365 license it’s no longer $10 it’s free for as long as you are employed/enrolled and if you retire/graduate/quit you get a discounted offer to make it yours for the first year or 3.

 

[c3k]

...and once the market locks into the "pay to type" model of online office products, do you really think MS will keep prices low?

 

[Domingo]

I'm actually surprised MS hasn't tried to tinker with the formats again. Remember when docx and xlsx came out and they looked busted on old Office versions + 3rd party alternatives?
If MS really wants people to upgrade from old versions they'll probably do something like that again.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Depends what features you are using, file share reports, offline file lock down, AES 256 encryption, integrated SharePoint, self destructing files, user hierarchy levels and sensitivity settings and sharing policies that go with it. Then on the Exchange side you’ve got all that plus hosted ADFS, VPN tunnels, access to hosted servers, Teams, Dynamics, a crap load of others I could list and won’t. But best of all privacy guarantees, they meet a lot of security requirements for Enterprise and Government that nobody else compares to.

Don't get me wrong. Many of these features seem very useful to Enterprise users, but this silly ad was targeted towards home users.

Honestly, unless something changes in Windows to the point where Office 2010 fails to run properly, I'll probably never buy another Office license.

 

[cattix]

Oh the horror, imagine perpetual-self-changing software, which is what this office365 nightmare has become. Every time you open it, it changes - the way you edit text, the way you work with parts of the software, the way you print n save. Disastrous for end users is the word that comes to mind. Nothing less then that. And you have to pay for that mess?

Enter OpenOffice. Works nice enough, no changes when noone asked for them, a bit cumbersome to learn but when over that, works just fine. Price? Best of all - free. Unlike M$.

 

[ManofGod]

Oh the horror, imagine perpetual-self-changing software, which is what this office365 nightmare has become. Every time you open it, it changes - the way you edit text, the way you work with parts of the software, the way you print n save. Disastrous for end users is the word that comes to mind. Nothing less then that. And you have to pay for that mess?

Enter OpenOffice. Works nice enough, no changes when noone asked for them, a bit cumbersome to learn but when over that, works just fine. Price? Best of all - free. Unlike M$.

LOL! Ah, no, not even close. (Oh, and there is no such work as noone, what does that even mean, somewhere around 12pm?)

 

[ikevi]

Enter OpenOffice. Works nice enough, no changes when noone asked for them, a bit cumbersome to learn but when over that, works just fine. Price? Best of all - free. Unlike M$.

And then you have to present a ppt you made in open office on a PC that only has MS software. Then it sadly doesn't work fine. Hopefully you didn't use custom characters (ie equations.) The only way you can get around those issues was by making a pdf version. But then you have issues when you want to show vids etc. And of course importing office docs into OpenOffice almost always has some formatting issue.

(Note I still use OpenOffice... but be honest there is a reason it is free, it sadly doesn't just work.)

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Enter OpenOffice. Works nice enough, no changes when noone asked for them, a bit cumbersome to learn but when over that, works just fine. Price? Best of all - free. Unlike M$.

OpenOffice is dead. Oracle made sure of that after they acquired Sun Microsystems, braining proprietary or killing every open source project Sun ever contributed to.

Apache is trying to bring it back, but the true open source successor is LibreOffice.

And it's fine for basic stuff. It lacks many of the more advanced features of Ms Office. The biggest shortcomings are in LibreOffice calc, which slows to a crawl with very large (hundreds of thousands of rows, or large numbers of worksheets) and starts experiencing data corruption in these large files. Many of the functions, calculators and tools also are either absent or do not work as well as in Excel. For basic stuff it works though.

The biggest exception is if you are expecting to work with people who use Microsofts Office. Open a Word document, and it is going to render and print differently than if opened in Microsofts Office. This kills it for many people.

I like LibreOffice, I use it for my home stuff. I have many spreadsheets of my bills and other things that I keep in LibreOffice Calc formats. I'll also type the few letters I need to type at home in it, but I also keep Ms Office 2010 installed in a Windows 10 VM just in case I need to actually collaborate with someone else on a document, because for that, it just won't do.

 

[nilepez]

If your business or school has an O365 license it’s no longer $10 it’s free for as long as you are employed/enrolled and if you retire/graduate/quit you get a discounted offer to make it yours for the first year or 3.

If either of us were covered by that, we'd already be using 365 (or a newer version of Office, not that I care about new features).

Don't get me wrong. Many of these features seem very useful to Enterprise users, but this silly ad was targeted towards home users.
Honestly, unless something changes in Windows to the point where Office 2010 fails to run properly, I'll probably never buy another Office license.

I upgrade for security patches. From a feature perspective, not counting the UI, there's been very little that I need since office 97 or 2000, but my days of using software that's not updated is over. 150 bucks for 9-10 years is fine by me. I'd be less inclined to do a sub version, but if I needed 4-6 seats, then I'd def go that way.

 

[Deleted member 126051]

I'm actually surprised MS hasn't tried to tinker with the formats again. Remember when docx and xlsx came out and they looked busted on old Office versions + 3rd party alternatives?
If MS really wants people to upgrade from old versions they'll probably do something like that again.

The problem is, that gives end-users a "jumping off" point.

Word Perfect (yes WORD PERFECT) is STILL a going concern these days (as a paid product), because stuff I created with Word Perfect 4.2 back in 1986 can still be opened and worked with TODAY in the current version.
It's hung on in medical and legal offices across the planet because of this sort of stability.

Does that make it harder to sell new copies? Sure.

So what? How much is lack of planned obsolesence worth in a given circumstance?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Microsoft makes Office 365 insanely cheap for businesses and home/education users for a good reason and I think we all know what that is. Once they hook everyone and are in a position to kill most of the standalone and on-premise products, just watch those subscription prices start creeping up.

Some of the Office 365 products are terrible compared to their on-premise products - look at SharePoint, for example. The online version does have some features the on-premise versions don't have, but the reverse is also true. Performance is terrible and you lose a huge amount of flexibility as well. I understand that SP is a complex product to build and run correctly on-premise (I've seen very few do it correctly) and I can understand small and medium businesses not wanting to pay six figure salaries to SharePoint experts, but in a few years, once MS has hooked everyone, look for them to increase the prices and add new plans and remove old ones. It's what MS does and it will be massively expensive for folks to migrate away from them after 10+ years of data, email, etc. are stored with MS.

 

[Domingo]

The problem is, that gives end-users a "jumping off" point.

Word Perfect (yes WORD PERFECT) is STILL a going concern these days (as a paid product), because stuff I created with Word Perfect 4.2 back in 1986 can still be opened and worked with TODAY in the current version.
It's hung on in medical and legal offices across the planet because of this sort of stability.

Does that make it harder to sell new copies? Sure.

So what? How much is lack of planned obsolesence worth in a given circumstance?

They would basically have to go some major companies on board to do it. At my office, once we started getting a bunch of .docx and .xlsx files from our various vendors we HAD to upgrade. Well, I suppose would probably could have downloaded the "viewer" apps that would let you see them, but it was easier to just upgrade. If MS can get enough people on board using a proprietary format, they can finally get those people off Office 2007-2016.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

If either of us were covered by that, we'd already be using 365 (or a newer version of Office, not that I care about new features).

I upgrade for security patches. From a feature perspective, not counting the UI, there's been very little that I need since office 97 or 2000, but my days of using software that's not updated is over. 150 bucks for 9-10 years is fine by me. I'd be less inclined to do a sub version, but if I needed 4-6 seats, then I'd def go that way.

What security concerns have you had with Office? I'm always concerned with security for software that is actively connecting to the outside internet, but Office packages stay within my LAN. Heck, only time I think they ever go beyond my local machine is when I open a document from a shared network drive...

...so I've never really been particularly concerned.

 

[nilepez]

What security concerns have you had with Office? I'm always concerned with security for software that is actively connecting to the outside internet, but Office packages stay within my LAN. Heck, only time I think they ever go beyond my local machine is when I open a document from a shared network drive...

...so I've never really been particularly concerned.

I sometimes have docs that aren't from me and while I don't recall opening a compromised doc, I'd rather be safe than sorry. IME, virtually all attacks on software are utilizing exploits that were already patched. I'm just not going to worry about 150 spread out over 7 years (assuming that's what the life cycle of the next version of Office). 20 years ago, I didn't worry about security, but those days are gone for me. I patch most apps soon after the release (though for critical software I'll often wait up to a week, just in case.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I sometimes have docs that aren't from me and while I don't recall opening a compromised doc, I'd rather be safe than sorry. IME, virtually all attacks on software are utilizing exploits that were already patched. I'm just not going to worry about 150 spread out over 7 years (assuming that's what the life cycle of the next version of Office). 20 years ago, I didn't worry about security, but those days are gone for me. I patch most apps soon after the release (though for critical software I'll often wait up to a week, just in case.

I do worry about security.

Well, worry is a strong word. I'm not losing sleep over it, but I do take security seriously. I just hadn't considered office documents as a likely attack vector.

That said, I can't remember the last time I opened an office document from an untrusted source. I usually use LibreOffice for most of my home office uses. I only keep Ms Office 2010 around for when I need to open a work document where original formatting and functions are important.

 

[nilepez]

I do worry about security.

Well, worry is a strong word. I'm not losing sleep over it, but I do take security seriously. I just hadn't considered office documents as a likely attack vector.

That said, I can't remember the last time I opened an office document from an untrusted source. I usually use LibreOffice for most of my home office uses. I only keep Ms Office 2010 around for when I need to open a work document where original formatting and functions are important.

I've just got too much on my home computer to risk it. I've got backups on my NAS, but better safe than sorry and as I said, I don't consider 20/year a big deal. That said, I guess I could give Libre a look in 2020 and decide if I want to stick with it or go to Office 2022(3?) if I don't like Libre.

I know I'm not a big fan of Google Docs spreadsheet. I've used it for some simple stuff related toa game i played, but it was much harder to do some formatting than it was in excel. Ironically, if i imported from Excel, as I recall, the formatting was as it was in Office.

Back in the 90s, my favorite wordprocessor was Ami-Pro, but when 95 came out, they were caught flatfooted and never recovered. Unlike others, I never liked Word Perfect, but I guess MS Word doesn't format WP docs correctly, if companies are still sticking with that. I haven't used it since the mid 90s (and even then only for teaching basic computer skills to education majors).