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Comment by thwayunion | Hacker News Reader

You can still just buy Office and not use the 365 offering [1]. The ban on Office 365 doesn't look like it's relevant to Office 2021.

Aside, both LibreOffice and Apple's office suite are perfectly serviceable for K12 education and most public administration.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-differ...

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> You can still just buy Office and not use the 365 offering

Until MS stops offering that and you're SOL, subscription model only going forward.

That’s been “any day now” for years, but they keep releasing standalone versions. They just keep some (usually server-powered anyway) features exclusive to 365.

The fact that they've recently rebranded Office to actually be Microsoft 365 but didn't bother doing so for the standalone Office 2021 product tells me it's probably on the way out. I doubt we'll see a Microsoft 365 2023 but maybe MS really just is that bad with brand names.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23402155/microsoft-offic...

They've also been offering deep discounts on Office 2021 for months now via the stackcommerce network which might indicate that 2021 is the last standalone release.

You mean those sketchy Office 2021 Professional Plus deep discounts, right? That's an (expensive) edition available in MSDN-like subscriptions, I'm almost sure they're either "cheap region" keys or MSDN-generated ones. Some of the worst offenders even tell you you'll get a username and password in an email (rather than product key), confirming it's just a user in their 365 tenant. (Of course I'll hand my documents off to CheapOfficeDotCom)

I bought one license.

It showed up in my Microsoft account alongside previous purchases which were at full price.

I haven't had an MSDN account for several years, so I can't compare with that.

Optimistically, maybe they’ll separate the brands now? But yeah, I guess we’ll see in 2023 if “Office 2024” comes out or not.

(Also, love that iOS parsed that “365 2023” as a phone number)

Yeah, but then we can just fork it and, uh. Oops.

If a country like France prefers it, it will be built for them.

Microsoft made by offline office program too slow to use when I updated to 11. It was a shakedown and I am not a happy customer.

I can't read the article (but gazing at the words, I almost feel like I can...) but I'd guess that all of their software needs are covered by other software systems licensed by the govt. And that this ban is more to make people stop using free cloud services instead of them.

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