Razors and blades. Microsoft continues to find ways to push companies towards Office 365 and keep the revenue rolling in, this time by forcing enterprise users to buy every traditional Office upgrade.
This new round of support policy change is sure to stymie companies that cut costs by licensing Office the old fashion way.
But basically, the Redmond based technology giant now has the power to stop enterprises that use workarounds to cut costs when they license the Microsoft Office suite — the traditional version of Office that is to say.
It has revised the right of Office 2016 to connect to the cloud-based services it rolled out in Office 2019.
According to the latest announcement from the company, organizations that want to run the regular desktop flavor of Office with Office 365 will need to license every version without skipping. Meaning, it may be time for these users to explore their licensing options.
This, the company has evidently done to ensure a continuous revenue stream for Office.
Essentially, this change affects companies that are using the older, on-premise version of the productivity suite but are connecting with cloud-based features like OneDrive, Skype and more. They probably are not going to be able to do that unless they upgrade to an Office 365 license.
These policy changes are not new to Microsoft.
The company first laid down these rules in April 2017, and mostly concerned the traditional Office suite with a perpetual license.
Back in September this year, Redmond announced 2023 as the end of support for Office 2019 to access its cloud services like Microsoft Exchange and OneDrive for Business storage.
All for a good cause, as they say.
