Microsoft: Don't buy Office 2019

It is rare that a company advises its customers to avoid a product that they produce.

It sounds like a bad business decision, but that is exactly what Microsoft attempts to do with a series of videos that highlights why customers should not buy the company's new Office version Office 2019 but subscribe to the company's Office 365 product instead.

Microsoft published a series of videos to hammer the point home; called The Twins Challenge, Microsoft gave identical twins the same tasks to see how they would perform them in Office 2019 and Office 365.

During one test, twins were asked to improve a resume, add relevant skills, and send it to recruiters in the end. In another, they were asked to create a spreadsheet with the United States state capitals, populations, and largest cities.

The videos cover Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The outcome, you could have guessed it, was that the twin using Office 365 completed the task faster and more efficiently than the twin using Office 2019.

Microsoft's message is clear: pick Office 365 because it gets jobs done faster and is better than Office 2019. Don't buy Office 2019 unless you really have to and cannot subscribe to Office 365.

The videos are ads, obviously, and it should not come as a surprise that the selected tasks favor the twin using Office 365.  If you would have asked them just to edit a document or create an Excel spreadsheet using data that is available to them already, the outcome would probably have been that they completed the tasks in about the same time.

Microsoft uses various strategies to make Office 2019 less attractive when compared to Office 365. The company made Office 2019 Windows 10 exclusive on Windows, and increased the price of select editions of Office 2019. Last but not least, Microsoft revealed that it won't add any new features to Office 2019 after its release. It will produce security and stability updates though.

Office 365 offers some advantages when it comes to price. While Office 2019 customers pay only once for a one-device license and Office 365 customers per month or year, Office 365's license is good for installing Office on multiple devices; this may or may not be a selling point.

Some customers may dislike the "cloud" nature of Office 365 and that everything is connected. Others may not need to extra features that Office 365 or Office 2019 offers and stick with an earlier version of Office.

Now You: Office 365 or Office 2019? Which would you pick and why?