Ms confirms - eventually Office to be subscription only

Anyway...

Office 2010 Starter wouldn't install on 1809, so I bought Office 2019!

pparks1 said:

Yeah, I haven't found confirmation from Microsoft about 2025 being the end. Maybe someday I'll wander down to the Microsoft office in my building in Detroit and ask them :)

Hi there

@pparks1

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Rather than the usual decade of support – the first five in what Microsoft dubs "Mainstream," the second five as "Extended," which provides security-only updates – Office 2019 will get only seven years.

"Office 2019 will provide 5 years of mainstream support and approximately 2 years of extended support," said Spataro in the Feb. 1 announcement. "This is ... to align with the support period for Office 2016. Extended support will end 10/14/2025."

That's the same day Office 2016's support expires.

The simultaneous retirement of the two perpetually-licensed suites is the strongest signal yet that Microsoft plans to shut down the one-time purchase option after Office 2019. By shortening 2019's support lifespan – something Microsoft has <i>never</i> done to Office for Windows – it will be able to wash its hands of both suites at the same time, ending the decades-old purchasing option and making the subscription-based Office 365 the only way to license the applications.
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cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

......making the subscription-based Office 365 the only way to license the applications.

Big mistake, in my opinion!

That would, however, be a perfect launching pad for 3rd parties to flood the market with an alternative!

Superfly said:

Agreed bud!

Besides I can't see corporates going cloud - that MS stratergy has failed as miserably as Windows mobile has.

Yup!

Call me old fashioned, but, if I buy sumpthin, I wanna see it, touch it, smell it, taste it, pass it through my lower intestine...!!! 'gnome sayin'?!?!?!

alphanumeric said:

How does that joke go, touch it, smell it, taste it, sure glad I didn't step in it.

Superfly said:

Agreed bud!

Besides I can't see corporates going cloud - that MS stratergy has failed as miserably as Windows mobile has.

I work for a very large corporation and are on Office 365. Doesn't make sense to manage and run Exchange and such in our datacenters as we don't make money on email. So, we shifted it over to Office365 about 1.5 years ago.

We also have a 66,000 square foot data center and we are going only cloud with everything going forward. We actually have to get sign off at the VP level to deploy anything new onprem. And we will be migrating existing systems to the cloud. The benefit here is that hardware is unlimited and we can do everything as infrastructure as code. We get better redundancy with data centers spread across the country and with refactoring applications and having distributed data, we don't have anywhere near as much stuff to backup.

I also worked for an Australian software company for about 8 years before that, and we also switched to Office365 as well. Same type of reasons as mentioned above, why spend time and effort supporting and running Exchange. Our engineers should spend time supporting and managing our own product that makes money.

You are kidding yourself if you don't think businesses use the cloud. The following all use AWS and these are just some that I know off the top of my head.

• Netflix
• Nasa
• Expeidia
• Phizer
• Yelp
• Lionsgate
• Adobe
• Twitch
• LinkedIn
• ESPN
• Facebook
• Twitter
• BBC
• BMW
• Dow Jones
• Kellogs
• Johnson and Johnson
• Citrix
• Nordstrom
• Schneider Electric
• Spotify
• Ticketmaster
• Adobe

Superfly said:

It's not about thinking.. I actually work with businesses that have sensitive data and do not trust the cloud... and I agree with them - especially reliquishing responsibility for data recovery of client data.

Sure, you will find circumstances where the data is too sensitive to put in the cloud. But the majority of business customers can engineer solutions to secure their data in the cloud. And they are doing just that.

I find in the IT field these days, if you aren't a cloud engineer/architect you are going to find it difficult to find positions in many corporations today. All of our positions now are labeled as infrastructure engineers, who need to understand AWS/Azure and be able to write infrastructure as code with things like Cloud Formation and Terraform. And many functions are moving away from servers entirely to serverless technology like Lambda, and Microservices via containers (ECS w/ Kubernetes).

Security is an ongoing project, regardless if you are on-prem or in the cloud. If you want a job in the next 10 years, you better be open to the cloud...employers are going to expect you to have proficiency there.