alt Hacker NewsWhile true and a comment I support, it is worth noting that offline versions of Microsoft Office are and have been just fine, including the latest version of 2024 just updated this week.
Replies
It's not even really particularly true, at least the implied criticism. My work uses M365 and Microsoft Office worked fine, both online and offline versions. Email stopped working, but AFAIK Open Office doesn't make an open source email server.
Is the outage so bad you actually can't launch excel.exe if you have a 365 license?
It's a technical debt to MS and will be phased out.
I guess you haven't been following the news. Users who purchased office 2021 Mac version discovered that edit feature was disabled after the product reached its end of life, and there are tutorials of "fixing" it: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1xf6o5f/fixed_how_.... similar to Office 2019: https://youtu.be/KRnno9VIZx0
With Microsoft, especially in the past few years, there is no such thing as "offline version"
Yes, but they eventually stop receiving updates, so you have to spend another $250 to get the newer version. And if you bought, say, Office 2021 just before Office 2024 is released (by necessity, for a new employee, say) then it has a significantly shorter lifespan. And you HAVE to spend this money because it is impossible to convince people they don't need Microsoft Word.