Microsoft cancels one-time purchase of Office 2019 through the Home Use Program

Office Professional Plus 2019 and Office Home and Business 2019 are no longer available as a one-time purchase through the Microsoft Home Use Program. Instead, Microsoft is now offering a 30% discount on an annual subscription to Office 365 Home or Personal.

The Microsoft Home Use Program gives employees of certain companies the opportunity to use the office software at home for a reduced rate. Until now, the employee discount applied to the ‘one-off’ license, whereby Office Professional Plus 2019 or Office Home and Business 2019 was purchased once. The Ars Technica website discovered that these options were tacitly removed from the website and replaced with a discounted annual license for Office 365.

Those who are eligible for the Home Use Program pay 70 euros annually for Office 365 Home and 49 euros for Office 365 Personal. Both versions offer the same functionality, including the premium version of the Office applications and a terabyte of storage space with OneDrive. The Home version can be installed by six family members, the Personal edition only by one person.

In recent years, Microsoft has already exchanged several one-off Office licenses for a subscription formula for Office 365. That has been beneficial to the company. In the last quarter of Microsoft’s fiscal year 2019, the Commercial Cloud division had revenues of more than $11 billion, a 39 percent growth compared to the same period a year earlier. The Commercial Cloud includes both the Azure services and Office 365. Microsoft does not disclose the share of both products in the revenue.