In a remarkable campaign, Microsoft makes firewood from Office 2019. According to Microsoft itself, this stupid version of Office cannot compete with the smarter Office 365, which does not happen to be only available in a subscription formula.
Microsoft prefers recurring revenues from its customers to one-time investments in an Office suite. Because this is a difficult slogan to unravel, the software giant launched a very remarkable campaign that puts its own Office 2019 offering in a bad light. In a series of videos, the functionality of Office 365 is compared to that of Office 2019, with the aim of making clear how much time you can save by choosing Office 365.
Strange campaign
Not surprisingly, Microsoft has chosen to highlight a number of special niche functions. For example, we see how someone with Office 2019 takes a long time to create a spreadsheet in Excel that contains all the states of the US, their respective capitals and their population. Anyone using Office 365 can add this information directly via a function called data types. This allows you to add geographic datasets or current stock information to the spreadsheet at the push of a button. Useful for those who just need such information on a frequent basis, although the function is not available all over the world.
In Word, we can see how drawing up a CV is easier thanks to a wizard and an embedded connection with LinkedIn. Finally, for PowerPoint, we get to see a demonstration of the layout assistant, which uses text and images to automatically add slides to a clear design.
More economical model
The functions are undeniably useful, but in practice they fulfil a niche function. Above all, Microsoft prefers customers to contribute their dough on a monthly basis. After all, anyone who uses Office via the subscription for three years is already paying more than someone who has bought Office 2019 as a one-off investment. The 365 version has the advantage of frequent extra updates and is more flexible in use, while the investment model for Office 2019 is outdated. On the other hand, small businesses, especially consumers, can often go on for a few years with the classic version of Office. In the end, there’s only so much that most people go crazy with PowerPoint or Word.
The most striking thing about the whole campaign is the way in which Microsoft blatantly portrays its own new product as outdated and a bad investment. This is surprising, since Office 2019 was only launched at the end of September 2018. If the suite already lacks important features compared to the cloud version today, it’s up to Microsoft, which deliberately chose to cut the 299 euro package. It is the second time in a short time that Redmond has blackened its own products. Recently we were told that Internet Explorer is no longer a browser.
Related: Microsoft: Internet Explorer is not a browser, do not use it as standard
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.