You now need a subscription to get the best of Microsoft Office – TechCrunch

Microsoft published this week Office 2019 for Windows and macOS, the latest version of its regular non-subscription productivity suite. This is the kind of office ten years ago, you would have bought a retractable packaging product at Office Depot. But that's really not the version of Office that Microsoft wants you to buy – or probably want to have. Because at this point, Office 2019 is basically a limited version that does not include the most exciting new features of its Office 365 subscription counterpart.

"We are working very hard to position Office 365 in all its forms – ProPlus for commercial users – as different from those versions of Office with a year number," said Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft. . "Office 2019, all the features we published there, were previously published in Office 365. So, the way we talk about cloud versions of Office 365 is that they are connected, which makes them alive.

Spataro also noted that Microsoft wanted users to remember that connected Office 365 applications would offer higher productivity due to their cloud connectivity and higher security. He also argues that these versions offer a lower total cost of ownership.

When Microsoft launched Office 2016, these versions were essentially snapshots ("carbon copies," called Spataro) of regularly updated Office 365 versions, which receive updates and monthly versions. For the first time, the on-premises version of Office provides only a subset of the full functionality, with many features missing, because virtually all the most exciting new features, including all machine learning features, are now available. Office 365 – will be absent from Office 2019.

"I think there will be some confusion," acknowledged Spataro. "It will take us some time to train people that the number of the year does not mean it's the best version."

In a way, that makes sense, because many of the new features that Microsoft now integrates with Office 365 only work because they are connected to the cloud. This is the only way to extract data for the new Microsoft Search feature, for example, and run the machine-learning models and extract data – and Microsoft has decided that the best way to bill them was to subscribe to a subscription.

Microsoft's strategy is not unlike that of Adobe, for example, which is now focusing on its Creative Cloud subscriptions and the cloud features that accompany them to promote its subscription service on retractable versions of its applications. The transition has been very successful for Adobe and Microsoft is looking for the same thing with Office 365 (and its counterpart Microsoft 365).