Microsoft just released Office 2019 but they don't want you to buy it

Microsoft’s attitude towards Office 2019 has been downright hostile. When the software giant first announced a standalone version of Office 2019 last year with a comparatively underwhelming attitude, it was pretty clear what Office suite they wanted users to pick. And, the company’s new marketing campaign that pits Microsoft Office 2019 and Office 365 only confirms what most people saw coming a mile away.

In a series of three videos labelled “The Twin Challenge”, Microsoft – rather than showcase the strengths of Office 2019 against Apple’s iWork or Google Drive – demonstrated how an AI-powered, always up-to-date Office 365 crushes the newly released standalone Office 2019 in a range of different tasks.

In each of the three videos, twins set out to complete a similar task on either Word, Excel or PowerPoint; with one of the twins using an Office 365 subscription and the other, the standalone Office 2019. The tasks involve everything from automatically filling geographic data in a spreadsheet to automatically adding relevant skills to a resume.

The similarity in the results of all tasks is how easily the twin using Office 365 completes the task using AI-powered assistance, as opposed to the twin struggling to manually complete his task with Office 2019.

WATCH: The Twins Challenge: Office 365 vs Office 2019

It is quite baffling to see Microsoft adopt a cynical marketing tactic against its own product. But perhaps there’s a method to this madness. The current price for a one-time Office 2019 purchase is twice as much as a yearly Office 365 subscription, so why would Microsoft undermine their own software? Given that Microsoft will probably recoup the cost of a single Office 2019 payment with a two-year subscription of Office 365, the company would rather lock customers into recurring subscriptions to keep profits up. The ads are an excellent example of the growing modern trend of SaaS replacing the traditional one-time payment system.