We’ve all had a chuckle at the expense of Microsoft Office, with the ’90s debuts of Bob and Clippy being mainly hilarious (as a minimum in hindsight). But now it is Microsoft itself that is amusing Office 2019, the ultra-modern model of its iconic workplace suite. Although Office 2019 became just launched this past September, Microsoft urges 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 organization, comes properly out and says that Office 2019’s applications are “frozen in time. They don’t ever get updated with new features,” at the same time as “Office 365 consists of absolutely installed Office applications … And those apps keep getting better through the years, with new competencies introduced each month.”
Wait, what befell to Office service packs? Well, it appears there received’t be any.
[ Further reading: Review: Office 2019 is the best advertisement yet for Office 365 ]
I’m sure the road of users wanting to enroll in “new abilities” is already forming. Or perhaps now not. What exactly are you able to add to a workplace suite these days, besides? As far as I’m worried, the closing worthwhile “new talents” came with Office 2003. In the software program industry, a 16-12 months drought for killer apps was once improbable.
What does Microsoft’s advertising push in opposition to itself suggest? It means that it’s miles moving from being a product business enterprise to being a provider corporation. Microsoft doesn’t need to sell you bits on a floppy CD, DVD, or download anymore. Instead, it wishes you to lease a provider from it for all time and a day.
It’s been coming for some time. In 2015, I pointed out that Microsoft made the most effective 10% of its revenue from Windows sales. In Microsoft’s final quarter, Microsoft mentioned that its Office revenue elevated eleven%, which become driven by using Office 365 Commercial revenue boom of 34%. Microsoft is continuing to move its business version to wherein the cash is. And the money is in cloud-based total offerings.
You can see this in what might first appear to you want unrelated developments. First, Microsoft gave up on developing its Edge net browser. It’s changing Edge’s internals with Google’s open-supply Chromium code.
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Second, Microsoft is reducing off aid for Internet Explorer (IE) 10 years earlier than anticipated. And, even more brilliant, Microsoft senior cybersecurity architect Chris Jackson surely blogged that Microsoft needs you to stop using IE and start using “modern-day” browsers as an alternative. And what are modern-day browsers? They’re Chrome-based browsers.
The upshot: Microsoft now not cares if you’re the usage of Microsoft bits in your computer. It wishes you to use archrival Google’s Chrome instead. Heck, a Microsoft internet developer, informed Mozilla’s builders on Twitter that they need to throw within the towel on Firefox in favor of Chromium.
Why? Because, searching ahead, Microsoft wants to cash in on services and not merchandise. That’s one of the motives why Microsoft has been embracing open-supply software. Not only is that in which its agency customers are actually, but if you’re presenting offerings as opposed to applications, you don’t care a lot approximately having manipulated the bits. What you care approximately is handing over exquisite offerings to keep clients coming. And that’s what Microsoft thinks it has in Office 365. The subsequent herbal step from here is Windows as a provider. I don’t realize while Microsoft will finally transfer over to a Chrome OS-fashion Windows. However, I do comprehend it’s coming. I am, in the interim, certain we received’t ever see some other standalone version of Office. It’s executed.
