Microsoft Subscriptions to Go away from next year — TheContentGenie

nikki_slay
2 min readSep 24, 2020

There is one thing we will be able to do away with from next year and which is subscription services. Xbox Game Pass. Peacock. Disney+. Apple Arcade. Adobe Creative Suite. Stadia. HBO Max. CBS All Access. Netflix. Amazon Prime. Hulu. Spotify. I wish we could go to those good old days when you’d pay a flat fee for something, and it was yours. Obviously, you can still do that with some things, and subscription services aren’t going away, but now that everything is an endless bill cycle, it would be nice to simply own something. Microsoft seems to understand this because it plans to release a new subscription-less version of Office in 2021.

Spotted by PCMag (via Windows Central), Microsoft makes a brief mention of this in an Exchange Team blog published yesterday: “Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021,” the company said. No other information about the new Office is available at this time.

Currently, there are a few other ways to get your hands on some Microsoft Office programs. You can access them for free on the web, the same way you would Google Docs. All you need is a Microsoft account, and you’re in. If you need to use those programs offline and install them directly to your computer, there are a few subscription tiers that will give you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and a few other programs and services. You can also buy a license for $150 and get Word, Excel, and PowerPoint without a subscription, though it doesn’t come with access to OneDrive and Skype.

If you’re a current student or educator, you can get all those programs plus Skype, OneDrive, and many other programs for free with Office 365 Education. But your school needs to have an Office 365 Education plan for you to take advantage of it.

It’ll be interesting to see what features Microsoft adds to its already robust slate of work productivity programs. It recently added some cool new transcription tools to Word online but has no plans to bring those same tools to the desktop version at this time. (Fingers crossed they’re included in the next version!) Either way, it’s a massive sigh of relief to see Microsoft will still offer perpetual licenses of some of its programs instead of becoming a 100% subscription service next year. If you’re someone like me who uses Microsoft Office a lot, you save more in the long run anyway.

Originally published at https://thecontentgenie.in on September 24, 2020.

--

--