Microsoft has announced an update to its consumer productivity suite, Office 2021, along with a alternative Specially business-oriented, long-term service channel Office.
Like the previous version, Office 2019, Office 2021 is Microsoft’s standalone option for people who don’t want to buy a cloud-enabled Microsoft 365 subscription. Office 2021 is released later this year for both. Mac and Windows, Said Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft 365, in a company blog post on Thursday. In the meantime, Office LTSC will be available as a commercial preview starting in April on both Mac and Windows, with a full version scheduled for later this year.
Microsoft will provide support for both products for five years, a slight downgrade from the seven-year warranty offered by previous Office products. Each will come with OneNote and will come with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Single purchase prices will remain the same for both personal users and small businesses, although there will be a 10% price increase for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard and individual purchases of Office applications.
The company did not provide many details about what new features and updates we will see with Office 2021, but confirmed what users with Office LTSC can expect.
“The new Office LTSC features will include accessibility enhancements, capabilities such as Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, support for dark mode in multiple applications, and performance improvements in Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint,” Shapiro wrote.
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While I’m sure Microsoft would prefer if businesses were already moving to the cloud, it’s also clear that the company realizes that not everyone can or even wants to. In Thursday’s blog post, Microsoft billed single purchase version of office as a “specialty product for specific scenarios”. These scenarios include if users are on regulated devices that cannot receive monthly updates, process control devices on a manufacturing floor that cannot be connected to the Internet, or specialthese systems must remain blocked over time and require a long-term service channel, he said.
In an interview with Virgin, Spataro described the company’s decision as “a matter of trial meet customers where they are. ”
“We certainly have a lot of customers who have moved to the cloud in the last 10 months, this has really happened en masse,” he told reporters. “At the same time, we certainly have customers who have specific scenarios where they don’t feel they can move to the cloud.”
Microsoft has previously maintained this even with its advertising push to convince users to move to the cloud, intends to continue rolling independent, perpetual licenses for its Office tools for the foreseeable future. ABased on today’s announcement, the company sundertakes to keep this promise.