So the company had nothing new to wow the world with when talking about Office 2019.

There’s nothing new in Office 2019 that hasn’t already been available for quite some time to millions of Office 365 subscribers (the company says it has more than 31 million subscribers to consumer editions), and in fact, Microsoft left several features out of Office 2019 that it had introduced in Office 365 over the past few years. Office 2019 is considerably less powerful than Office 365. It used to be that whenever Microsoft released Office with a new version number - for example, Office 2016 - that version was more powerful than any other available. There’s another reason that Microsoft whispered. It’s clear that Microsoft wants people to move to Office 365, so it wants to draw as little attention as possible to any new perpetual Office release. That’s in contrast to Office 365, which requires an ongoing subscription fee and is constantly updated with new features. When you purchase a perpetual version of Office, such as Office 2016 or Office 2019, you pay a one-time fee for it and own it forever - and it never gets new features.

There’s good reason for that: Microsoft is pushing Office 365, the subscription of version of Office, over the perpetual version of the suite. In years gone by, Microsoft typically trumpeted new Office releases with great fanfare and hoopla, but this time it released a blog post or two with few details and left it at that. When Microsoft released Office 2019 for Windows this fall, it did so not with a bang, but a whisper.

Outlook professional plus 2019