Microsoft may be putting most of its Office-related development resources into its cloud-based Office 365 suite, but it hasn’t given up on standalone versions of the productivity software.
The Exchange Team didn’t go into many details about the new Office release, unfortunately. In fact, they only mentioned it in a single line, which reads as:
Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021.
Exchange News and Announcements – Microsoft Ignite 2020 Edition
So, there you have it. Standalone Office is finally back after a lengthy hiatus — the last version of the software to release was Office 2019, which actually came out around this time in 2018.
The declaration that Office would continue to be sold in perpetual license form was not unexpected. Two years ago, when Microsoft launched Office 2019, marketing executive Jared Spataro pledged that a successor would be sold, saying, “We’re committed to another on-premises release in the future.”
However, Spataro did not specify a release timetable.
It’s unclear what new features we can expect to see in Office 2021 (or perhaps 2022), but we wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft pulls a few ideas from Office 365. Even so, standalone versions of Office will never be as up-to-date as their live counterparts, but that’s something plenty of customers will probably be willing to live with.
Swapping constant feature updates for reliable, 24/7 offline document access is a pretty fair trade, all things considered.
Office’s perpetual version is the one that a company purchases once with an up-front payment, typically as part of a volume licensing deal, rather than “rented” by paying monthly subscription fees. A perpetual license payment provides the rights to run the application suite as long as one wants, even long after Microsoft stops serving security updates if the user is willing to take risks. It can be installed on just one PC or Mac, and so is tied to that device, not to its current user.
Just like Office 2019, but more so
Microsoft said nothing about the follow-up to Office 2019 other than to define its six-month-wide release window.
“We will share additional details around the official names, pricing and availability of all these products later,” Microsoft said in its Ignite blog post regarding the next Office and other Office-related software.
We’re not sure how much the new version of Office will cost, but we’ll be sure to update you when Microsoft releases more information about it; so stay tuned!