10/20/2020
Three years ago, at Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference, Microsoft announced Office 2019, its latest version of Office that can be purchased on a perpetual license, meaning that you own it forever. Now here we are, three years later, and it’s being announced that there’s a new version on the way.
Some speculated that Office 2019 was to be the last perpetual license version of the product, with Microsoft’s push to get users onto Office 365 (now Microsoft 365), its subscription-based licensing model. Microsoft was always careful not to confirm this though, always saying that it would gauge the market. If businesses still don’t want to move to Microsoft 365, then the Redmond firm will keep churning out new versions of Office.
According to a post by the Exchange team at Microsoft, a new perpetual release of Microsoft Office is on the way for those who don’t want to purchase a subscription license. The company shared no additional details about the new Office, but the post does say that the launch date could be sometime in the second half of 2021. The new Office will be available for both PC and Mac.
Microsoft Office’s perpetual version is the one that a company or individual purchases once with an up-front payment, rather than “rented” by paying monthly subscription fees. A perpetual license payment provides the rights to run the application suite as long as one wants, even long after Microsoft stops serving security updates if the user is willing to take risks. It can be installed on just one PC or Mac, and so is tied to that device, not to its current user.
A perpetual license for Office is something many users prefer over the Office 365 subscription license. However, it’s possible that the new Office won’t be as feature rich as Office 365 and if that’s the case then the perpetual license is definitely not for pro users.
Microsoft promised that it will share additional details around the official names, pricing and availability of all these products at a later date.
