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raw_anon_1111yesterday at 2:43 PM5 repliesview on HN

Office 365 - the subscription version of Office - was released in 2011.

Microsoft still offers a one time purchase of Office. There is precedent for Bigcorp keeping a one time purchase version and offer a prescription.


Replies

nialseyesterday at 3:07 PM

The one-time purchase version of Microsoft Office is not available worldwide. Where offered, it is reduced to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, with Outlook as a Business edition extra. Individual apps can sometimes be bought separately, but pricing usually makes this impractical. This is to push buyers to Microsoft 365 subscriptions which is the primary product.

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Plasmoid2000adyesterday at 2:53 PM

Yes - but perpetual purchases have an interesting gotcha that Microsoft didn't realise at first. To encourage subscription over perpetual, ongoing or evergreen updates are limited to subscription version.

Office 2024 has every feature that was added since Office 2021 to the subscription version - while a chunk of loyal customers are unaware of them. Back when Google was competing hard with Google Suite, a big perception problem formed with the perpetual customers believing and convincing others that Google were far ahead, with collab editing and other features - after Office had added equivalent.

So for me, If there's a subscription and one-time option - I wonder if the one-time gets all updates going forward. If it doesn't, I realise that they'll regret that if competition picks up, and try to fix it later. If it does include updates... I worry it will be like many other lifetime updates one-time purchases - when competition is low they'll renege on that promise.

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addandsubtractyesterday at 3:21 PM

*Microsoft 365 Copilot

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PinguTSyesterday at 3:00 PM

Actually, you can buy only the 2024 version of MS Office for Mac, while the subscription is more up to date. You cannot buy a packaged 2025 version.

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benterixyesterday at 6:23 PM

> Microsoft still offers a one time purchase of Office.

he writing is on the wall, they will remove it sooner or later.

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