You likely have heard rumblings about Office 2019 being released this summer. However, you also likely know that Microsoft has been heavily promoting Office 365 subscriptions which provide frequent upgrades (not just updates). So what is new Office 2019 for Office365 customers? In a word, nothing.
Office 365 subscribers receive the release version of Office 2016 but also receive updates every week and upgrades twice per year. Office 2019 is nothing more than a roll up of Office 2016 plus the upgrades Office 365 customers have been receiving for the last few years.
Office 2016 for Office 365 customers was renamed to Office 365 a few months ago so when you start up an application like Word or Excel the splash screen has changed from displaying Word 2016 to Word Office 365. See the PowerPoint Office 365 splash screen to the right.
Office 2019 will be the last stand alone version of Office that can be purchased. Microsoft, like most companies, is pushing everyone to a subscription model which:
- allows for upGRADES to be released as they are developed rather than holding them back for years and bundling them into a “new version”
- provides Microsoft with a much more steady cash flow. Upgrades every three years lead to spikes in sales, but subscriptions come in all year round, every year
Three Other Office 2019 things you should be aware of:
- For those who still want the standalone version of Office (like Office 2019), Microsoft will be blocking all non-subscription (i.e. Office 365) products from connecting to their on-line services, like OneDrive and SharePoint in the next couple of years. This means you may have Office 2019 in the year 2025 and it will work fine on your desktop, but it will not connect to Azure, OneDrive, Sharepoint…
- It’s also worth noting that Office 2019 will not run on Windows 7 or Windows 8
- Office 2019 will ONLY come in a Click-to-Run package and will NOT have and .MSI installer