I purchased a
Microsoft Office Professional 2021 key from takealot. I would not normally purchase keys on the web, but since this listing is on takealot, I presumed that it must be legit. Now, the following issues comes to mind:
- The image shows Office Professional Plus 2021 but the product description Office Professional 2021.
- The provider is Compumedia Sales, they show other Microsoft products on their takealot page.
- The official Office Professional 2021 license costs R10 899.00, while this key costs R2 398.00.
- I'm well aware of the proliferation of Office keys that can be bought on the Net, many of them corporate licenses.
- The license key isn't electronically provided but was delivered in an envelope, printed on a A4 sheet.
- Since there weren't any instructions included, I download Office Pro Plus directly from Microsoft. When I entered the key it did not want to activate, but when I restarted Word it shows that it's activated, as below. I'm concerned that this license might be indeed a corporate license and might be deactivated after some time.
View attachment 1217332
I would really appreciate some helpful comments, I'm not inviting a debate about free opensource productivity or pirated software.
As others have said, Pro Plus is not available to the general public. These keys are available from the MAPS subscription, sold to enterprise and educational institutions with a volume license agreement, or purchased direct from a distributor, usually with new hardware.
It's not normally this cheap, so those keys are "grey" imports.
Sorry for my ignorance, but why do people still buy Office?
Office 365 is couple bucks a month and you always have the latest?
For some companies it's a compliance thing. Office 2021 will receive security updates for the next five years, but no significant feature or UI changes.
For others, it's data security. They might have good local controls for handling of company files, but if you don't want to deal with Azure AD and OneDrive Sync (and all its idiosyncracies), then purchasing a perpetual licence looks better from the perspective of the administrator.
There's also a lot of pushback from the future Microsoft wants everyone to adopt where everything is available through a subscription, and the finance teams are looking at the incoming price hikes to Microsoft Partners and weighing their options. Office 2021 Home and Business is R4200 from Raru, and works out to R840 per year. In that same timeframe, you'll be paying R2314 for Microsoft 365 Business Standard per user per year, AND you might as well use all of the services available to you including hosted email, OneDrive, and Sharepoint in addition to Teams integration.
Businesses that don't want to silo all their data and services with a single company, especially if Azure AD Sign-In goes down again and no-one can send emails, will gravitate to perpetual licences.
This is aside from IT MSPs making this decision because they don't want Microsoft to poach their clients. If you're an MSP and a single client is paying for 100 seats for Office 365, Microsoft is keenly aware of how much they can undercut you and force you out of that relationship with the customer.
