Microsoft announces Office transformation to Microsoft 365, will offer new versions only on a subscription basis

Office, one of the world’s oldest software brands and one of Microsoft’s most profitable, will soon disappear. The company has announced that it will integrate Microsoft Office into the Microsoft 365 family of subscription-based products, and the change will come soon enough. Already Office 365 was converted to Office 365 just a few years ago, and now Microsoft Office on its own will no longer exist outside of older versions.

Microsoft Office will be fully integrated into Microsoft 365 subscriptions

Basically, Microsoft is announcing a move to subscription-based services, something that has proven very profitable in recent years. All Microsoft Office applications, from Word, Excel and Power Point, to Outlook, Loop, Clipchamp, Stream and the new Designer, will be fully integrated into Microsoft 365. Accordingly, the Office mobile app and Office.com portal will soon be changed to mark this change in strategy.

Office.com will be changed in November, while a new Microsoft 365 app will replace the Office app on iOS and Android in January. It promises a new interface and new features, as well as the possibility of enhancements and new capabilities added over time in the form of updates.

Microsoft Office will still remain for sale in the Office 2021 version and as part of the Office LTSC plans, however, but this will most likely be the last “standalone” version of Office outside of the Microsoft 365 package. New capabilities released via incremental or even generational updates will come to subscribers automatically.

While Microsoft 365 subscriptions also come with other perks, such as OneDrive cloud storage, syncing between devices, and access to the latest updates faster, many users don’t need all of these, just wanting to use a simple, high-performance office software suite. For them, the only solution will remain Office 2021, or cheap or free alternatives like OpenOffice, and Google Docs.