After Office 2019 is released in the 2nd half of this year – that will be the last version of Office sold without an office365 subscription.
Microsoft will shorten the lifecycle for all the existing versions of office so everyone who wants to use office tools will need to buy an Office365 subscription at some point.
In 2017, Microsoft slashed the rights of users running non-subscription Office when it announced that perpetual-licensed versions of Office 2016 will be barred from connecting to Microsoft’s cloud-based services, including hosted email (Exchange) and online storage (OneDrive for Business) after Oct. 13, 2020. Under the new rules, owners of a perpetual license for Office 2016 can use those services only during the first half of their 10-year support lifecycle, the portion Microsoft dubs “mainstream.” Office 2016’s mainstream support ends Oct. 13, 2020.
By releasing Office 2019 this year, Microsoft will give enterprises a year or so to migrate from Office 2016 (or an earlier edition) before the cloud service cutoff. Rather than the usual decade of support – the first five in what Microsoft dubs “Mainstream,” the second five as “Extended,” which provides security-only updates – Office 2019 will get only seven years. “Office 2019 will provide 5 years of mainstream support and approximately 2 years of extended support,” said Spataro in the Feb. 1 announcement. “This is … to align with the support period for Office 2016. Extended support will end 10/14/2025.”
That’s the same day Office 2016’s support expires.
The simultaneous retirement of the two perpetually-licensed suites is the strongest signal yet that Microsoft plans to shut down the one-time purchase option after Office 2019. By shortening 2019’s support lifespan – something Microsoft has never done to Office for Windows – it will be able to wash its hands of both suites at the same time, ending the decades-old purchasing option and making the subscription-based Office 365 the only way to license the applications.
Office 2019 will be supported only on Windows 10.
