On the one hand, I can understand why Microsoft has it working this way. If Office 2019 didn’t switch to view-only mode upon inability to reach the license server[1], someone could buy 1 subscription, then install it on more machines that the license allows:
Activate license on machine 1
Use firewall to block contact with license server
Move license to machine 2
Repeat
But, for people who buy the perpetual-license version, this seems like a class-action lawsuit is warranted. The question is, what did the terms and conditions for Office 2019 say? Does it state that after the support period expires you will lose the product?[2]
In my opinion, if a company uses a license server to maintain functionality in a lifetime license product, then they need to keep the license server (and the product’s ability to connect to it) working. If they can’t do that then they should either:
Refund money
Give a free upgrade to a version that still works
Deliver a final update that removes the license check from the product.
The people who are really burned by this are those that recently bought Office 2019 lifetime after support was already ended. They thought they were getting a real deal!
I think Office 2019 was only perpetual licensed, but it was using the same Click-to-Run codebase as the subscription Microsoft 365. So while it is marketed as distinct products, at the codebase level it is just a different license. ↩︎
Sure, but the principle of planned obsolescence still applies. There’s a reason vintage appliances are as high priced as they are—they’re in demand because they last forever.
‘As with all office suites, “compatible” is a spectrum.’
You can say that again. We had a group collaborating on a Google Docs document with fairly elaborate formatting, images, etc. We ended up exporting it to Word and doing the final formatting there because it was such a mess.
According to the license agreement dated September 2018 for Office 2019, if you reside or have a business in the US, disputes are handled either through small claims court or binding individual arbitration. You waive the class action lawsuit avenue. Per section 9:
Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actiopn, and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed. Nor is combining individual proceedings without the consent of all parties.
Whether that’s enforceable or not is up to the courts…
Do they actually call it that? Or is that a phrase that we, on the Internet, have been using simply to distinguish it from a subscription with monthly/annual payments?
Microsoft does not refer to the license as “perpetual” or “lifetime”. They refer to it as a “one time purchase” of Office 2024.
I also don’t see any statement that they will offer any kind of updates for any Office product version after it reaches its end of support timeline. That being said, not updating a certificate so that software running in environments that were considered “supported” is a pretty crappy business practice.
“lifetime” is also appears to be a made up term by retailers - nothing to do with Microsoft.
Support for Office 2019 for Mac will end on October 10, 2023 . Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function—they won’t disappear from your Mac, nor will you lose any data.
Support for Office 2019 for Mac ended on October 10, 2023 . Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps won’t lose any data. Your data can be accessed on any supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.
Microsoft says a certificate they use to validate your Office license is expiring. When it does, the apps cannot confirm that you have a valid license, so they stop letting you make changes. But certificates can get renewed. The fact that Microsoft is using this expiration as a deadline that retires older versions of Office, rather than quietly renewing the certificate, is a choice. In October 2023, when Microsoft ended support for Office 2019 for Mac, they explicitly told customers: “Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function.” This sounds to me like they are now breaking that promise.
By the way, JimmyTech’s blog post is a helpful summary of the options that people impacted by the certificate issue have.
I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to suggest that Microsoft actually broke the terms of its license agreement with its users, but I certainly do think it broke the spirit of the agreement by failing to update the certificates. I don’t believe at all that they are required to update the certificates, but it would be a very nice gesture to its customers. If you use Office 2019, I think it is completely fair to let them know you are unhappy with their behavior.
M365 subscribers like me are affected too, if we cannot or do not wish to run macOS Monterey or higher, which would permit updating the Office apps to at least version 16.83. Microsoft is disabling a completely functional, paid and licensed suite of applications, because they do not care to provide a means to update the expiring security certificate. Must be that they are not required legally to do so, and since they think of Mac users as second-class, they do not care.
I’m in the process of transitioning Outlook to Thunderbird, and the rest of the MS Office apps to SoftMaker FreeOffice 2024, which so far I like better than LibreOffice. For anyone else making a transition, remember that you may need to grab a copy of the fonts folder from within the application package of one of the apps, such as from:
Applications > Microsoft Word > Right Click > Show Package Contents > Contents > Resources > DFonts
The fonts folder is about 500MB, containing around 260 fonts. If you’ve been using any of them, you’ll need to find another way to activate those fonts.
I expect that, buried in the licence agreement, there is a clause to the effect that they retain the right to alter these terms at any time! Maybe this will be challenged through a class action?
I’m sure you’re right about the license agreement. That approach is pretty standard these days. That said, I doubt there was anything specific in the license agreement that would have required Microsoft to update the certificates. I’m pretty sure that what Microsoft is doing technically is legal with respect to the license agreement, even as it stood in 2019.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d guess the legal question is whether Microsoft’s marketing and support statements were enough to constitute an implied offer of product support that appears misleading in retrospect. If so, that may be grounds for an ambitious class action attorney to pursue a case, especially if the class ends up being large enough to promise significant rewards.
Of course, a better response from Microsoft would be to update the certificates, assuming it’s not prohibitively complicated or expensive for some reason.
If it’s a server-side certificate, then it should be pretty easy for anybody in their cloud/IT department to just update it.
If it’s a client-side certificate, then they’d need to issue a software update. Should be a pretty trivial update, unless their system is needlessly complicated.
In either case, it should be a relatively low-cost fix. But low-cost is not no-cost and Microsoft may have concluded that there’s no point to spending even one cent on updating a product that reached end-of-life nearly three years ago. I disagree with that logic, but nobody at Microsoft asked me for my opinion.
