this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Yay, that'll be a fun day at work... I'm in charge of administering our fleet of Macs and all the users use MS Office heavily. We are currently not allowed to provide access to Office 365 for data protection reasons, so if they brick the volume license we are currently using I won't have a viable solution for them, beyond switching to OWA/Apple Mail and some other office suite.
The writing's been on the wall for a while though. They recently made it so that you can't hide the Office 365 nag screen while using a volume license, which confuses users into thinking they don't have a license. I fucking hate Microslop.
Edit: As far as I can tell this will only affect users using a 2019 volume license (which is already not compatible with current versions), but the 2021 license will continue to work? (Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/update-microsoft-365-or-office-on-your-macos-or-ios-device-f418ae5d-bb5f-4078-b3d9-9340f5dd084e ). I'd definitely be interested if anyone has more information. In any case, I'm sure it's just a matter of time until they fuck everyone not using a subscription based license for any of their products.
Edit 2: Nevermind. 13th October is the day Microslop has chosen to fuck me: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/system-requirements/end-of-support-for-office-2021
You'll still get a few years before the software becomes remotely disabled, though. This story about Office 2019 losing functionality follows Office 2019 losing support in 2023. If that's the rate things go, then maybe Office 2021 will lose functionality either 2 years from now (7 years after release) or 3 years from now (3 years after losing support).
True, but running EOL software that doesn't receive updates to known vulnerabilities isn't really an option.
Yeah, but that's always been true of paid software licenses for a particular version: it reaches EOL and you have to decide whether to live with the possibility of unpatched known vulnerabilities or pay for an upgrade to a more recent release.
MS Office has been doing this from back in the Windows 3.0 days at least.
True. But Office for Mac uses the same installer for 365, 2021 and 2024 (and 2019 until they EOL'd it). It's not that they stop updating old software. They just arbitrarily decide you no longer get the updates if you're on an older license.