Microsoft planea actualizar el escritorio "perpetuo" para las empresas en la segunda mitad del año, cuando también recorta el soporte a cinco años y aumenta los precios en un 10%.
The company's multiple attempts to obtain the traditional form of licensing, called "perpetual" because the license gives you the right to run the software for as long as you want, is further proof, if need be, that Microsoft is willing to push, attract and produce customers. ads in service type subscriptions. Microsoft reiterated, apparently for the umpteenth time, that it was spending virtually all of its Office-related resources on Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions, hinting that anything but a subscription would be second-rate and subpar.
What is changing?
The upcoming changes to Office are among the most sweeping since Microsoft revised the suite's development and release schedule with the release of Windows 10. Two versions: Instead of a single nameplate for all perpetual editions of Office, as in the past, now there will be two. The next Office for home and small business will be called Office 2021, according to Jared Spataro, the executive who runs the Microsoft 365 group. But the SKU (inventory management unit) designed for businesses and other large organizations will be attached to Office LTSC . the four-letter suffix for Long Term Support Channel, a term borrowed from Windows. Support: The new standard support duration for Office, both 2021 and LTSC, will be five years, not the 10 years the package once received. (The latest version with a decade of support? Office 2016.) That doesn't even match the seven years given to Office 2019 (which leaves support in October 2025). The only SKUs that previously came with five years of support were the Mac ones (which still had less than the Windows versions). Although Spataro hasn't revealed a release date for Office LTSC or Office 2021 (the former will launch in "the second half of the year," he said, while the latter will debut "later this year"), the 2021 stamp suggests that at the very least, the consumer/SMB edition will be released no later than summer. (Microsoft's digital name Office used the current year through the July release date; release dates after those carry the following year designation.) While the shared name offers some interesting clues about the future of Office, the real difference is reduced support.
The supporting spear
Microsoft uses its support policy like a weapon - a Greek hoplite's spear, for example - to nudge and nudge customers toward ends the company wants (which customers may or may not also want). In fact, support is one of Microsoft's most powerful weapons for guiding customer behavior, second only to price. Examples of Microsoft support abound. For example, it directs business customers toward the Windows 10 Enterprise and Education SKUs by offering these versions, and only them, 30 months of support, one year longer than the 18 months others like consumers and small businesses, they get it. . Reducing support for Office LTSC and 2021 to five years makes the software less attractive compared to Office 365 / Microsoft 365. The biggest advantage of perpetual licenses over subscriptions is cost, but that advantage is based on relatively up-to-date infrequent customer. By offering an update every three years and limiting support to five years, Microsoft has forced customers who want or need a perpetual license to deploy all versions. There is no way to skip an update as there is no overlap in support for n and n + 2 versions.
![Programa de soporte y lanzamiento de Microsoft Office LTSC]()
IDG / Gregg Keizer Since Microsoft has introduced the Office LTSC release and support program, customers will need to update on the release of each new update. The reason: there is no overlap between the current version and the next one. Having to upgrade every three or four years, without the possibility of extending it to better amortize the purchase of the perpetual license, puts pressure on the prices of the on-premise option. Office Professional 2019, for example, costs €440 retail. Over a 36-month period, this reduces to €12.22 per month; for 48 months, it costs €9.17 per month. Both numbers are higher than the $8.25 per month price of the Microsoft 365 Apps subscription, the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) plan that only provides the Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote suite apps. Bottom line: force upgrades at a rate of three or even four years (and a four-year rate would be next to impossible, as that would require immediate implementation at launch, with only a 12-month upgrade window until the final), Microsoft has ruled out the perpetual license market. And it certainly won't help when Microsoft raises prices for Office LTSC, which it promised to do. "We ... will increase the price of Office Professional Plus, Office Standard and individual applications by up to 10% based on general availability," Spataro said. The reason for the increase? It's not clear, though Spataro seems to link the price hike to Microsoft's view of LTSC as "a specialized product for specific scenarios." (Think about when companies make limited editions and charge higher prices because of how difficult they went, or companies that charge higher prices when the market for that product is relatively small.) Meanwhile, prices for Office 2021 will not change, Spataro said. Of the described target audience, consumers and small businesses, Microsoft is likely to stick with the last two editions. For Office 2019, they were named "Office Home and Student" (consumer) and "Office Home and Business" (SMB).
What does LTSC mean?
It's hard to know what to make of corporate SKU names like Office LTSC. Obviously, Microsoft wants to pair the pay-one-time version of Office with the long-term release option of Windows. According to the company, it was for consistency. "With this release, we will align Office and Windows to support the same limited scenarios," Spataro wrote.
While Microsoft has long denigrated Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC—again, which stands for "Long Term Support Channel," formerly known as the "Long Term Support Branch," or LTSB—as an illegitimate choice for mainstream deployment, rare. He once headed to the perpetual office in the same manner. There have been exceptions: Two years ago, Microsoft launched a misguided PR campaign that portrayed Office 2019 as second-rate to Office 365.
By choosing the negative LTSC label, Microsoft has hinted, and not too subtly, that it would disparage Office's one-time payment option because it has the Windows version of the same name. And now that both enjoy reduced support, customers would do well to assume that each option is, or will soon be, on death row, with that step followed in the near to medium term by a declaration of death, deprecation, and then abandonment. .
(Computerworld posits that there is no better indication of a company's desire to get rid of a product than its reduction in support. This is the clearest end-time message, unless you tune out).
It's not clear if Microsoft's new name means it will build the perpetual version of Office differently than it has in the past. When the company built Office 2019, for example, it took the code from Office 365, but not the current code, it inserted some of the features and functionality that debuted in Office 365 ProPlus (the name of the actual Office applications provided with the various services). 365). since the release of Office 2016, then released the version. As Microsoft explained, the process, as it did, is a subjective selection of what to include in the perpetual release.
This, of course, allows Microsoft to put its thumb on the Office 365 / Microsoft 365 scale.
(It also ensures that Office 2021, like 2019 before it, sports apps that, in the words of Spataro two years ago, are "frozen in time" because they "never get updated with new features." This is another great benefit of Office 365/Microsoft 365.) Using LTSC with Office for the enterprise level perpetual license suggests that it will be built in the same way as Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC.
LTSC is just another version of Windows, another channel in the Redmond language, like Semi-Annual and Insider. But Windows 10 LTSC is designed differently, at least according to Microsoft. "... Each version contains all the new features and support included in Windows 10 feature updates that have been released since the previous version of LTSC," Microsoft said in 2018.
Since Spataro has provided few details about the content of Office LTSC, it's impossible to know if the above is how Microsoft will build the release. If Office LTSC includes everything that has been updated or added to Office 365 / Microsoft 365 since Fall 2018 (when Office 2019 was released), good for customers. That would mean that Microsoft isn't penalizing perpetual editing, which seems unlikely.
<p>Copyright © 2021 IDG Communications, Inc.</p>
IDG / Gregg Keizer Since Microsoft has introduced the Office LTSC release and support program, customers will need to update on the release of each new update. The reason: there is no overlap between the current version and the next one. Having to upgrade every three or four years, without the possibility of extending it to better amortize the purchase of the perpetual license, puts pressure on the prices of the on-premise option. Office Professional 2019, for example, costs €440 retail. Over a 36-month period, this reduces to €12.22 per month; for 48 months, it costs €9.17 per month. Both numbers are higher than the $8.25 per month price of the Microsoft 365 Apps subscription, the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) plan that only provides the Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote suite apps. Bottom line: force upgrades at a rate of three or even four years (and a four-year rate would be next to impossible, as that would require immediate implementation at launch, with only a 12-month upgrade window until the final), Microsoft has ruled out the perpetual license market. And it certainly won't help when Microsoft raises prices for Office LTSC, which it promised to do. "We ... will increase the price of Office Professional Plus, Office Standard and individual applications by up to 10% based on general availability," Spataro said. The reason for the increase? It's not clear, though Spataro seems to link the price hike to Microsoft's view of LTSC as "a specialized product for specific scenarios." (Think about when companies make limited editions and charge higher prices because of how difficult they went, or companies that charge higher prices when the market for that product is relatively small.) Meanwhile, prices for Office 2021 will not change, Spataro said. Of the described target audience, consumers and small businesses, Microsoft is likely to stick with the last two editions. For Office 2019, they were named "Office Home and Student" (consumer) and "Office Home and Business" (SMB).