The relationship of Microsoft with which it was one of its star products for many years. The company has been trying to make users forget the existence of the office desktop and promoting its cloud version, currently called Microsoft 365, while maintaining the product. Microsoft's interest is understandable given that the first requires a one-time payment and the user has the program foreverwhile Microsoft 365 forces a monthly or annual subscription. So the company considers the traditional Office a niche product that it rarely talks about and that it maintains “for use in exceptional circumstances“, referring to those that are normal for many buyers.
That is why Microsoft's announcement of the next launch of Office 2024, three years after its last edition. In a post on the Microsoft blog, the company begins by explaining how fantastic and advanced Microsoft 365 is and then comments that Office 2024 is very little next to itas it “will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 apps.”
That subset is the same as in previous editions, but will include some news. Among them, “new meeting creation options and search improvements in Outlookdozens of new features and functions in Excelincluding dynamic graphics and matrices, and improved performance, security, and accessibility.”
This edition will lose one of its applications, Microsoft Publisherand will not include Teams which can be downloaded and installed separately. Yes it will have PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Access, OneNote and Wordas usual.
Microsoft explains that this version will lack the cloud capabilities of Microsoft 365. That is, the use of AI Copilot in cloud-backed applications or security features. Therefore, it is not a recommended version for those who want to experiment with artificial intelligence in Word, Excel and other apps, but for others it is much more economically profitable than Microsoft 365.
In 2022, Microsoft announced that the Office brand would disappear completely and the suite of applications would be renamed Microsoft 365 also in its desktop version, but it finally seems that the name change has not occurred.
Office 2024 will arrive at the end of the year, both for Windows as for Macand will receive security updates for a period of 5 years, until 2029. This will not be the last Office, Microsoft assures that there will be at least another edition in the future.