Microsoft Bashes Its Traditional Office 2019 Suite To Promote Office 365

Microsoft published a set of three videos that it has dubbed "The Twins Challenge" to help promote its Office 365 software. In the videos, Microsoft is taking shots at more traditional office programs such as its recently released Office 2019 in order to demonstrate the advantages held by Office 365.

The three videos published to date focus on the three most important components of Microsoft's Office product suite: PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. To make the videos a tad more comical, Microsoft hired biological twins to test these utilities, with the twist being that one twin would use Office 2019 whereas the other twin would use Office 365.


The most impressive video demonstration was for the Excel software, which required the set of twins to research and information about all 50 of the United States to a spreadsheet. Using an active Internet connection, the twin using the Office 365 software was able to list all 50 states, add their correct state capitals, population, and list the largest city in each state before the twin using the Office 2019 software was able to finish entering the information for Alabama. The job of the person using Office 365 was made easy as they didn't need to actively search for any information. By simply entering "States" in the column header, the software automatically picked up and filled out the rest of the information.


The Microsoft Word test was somewhat less impressive, but it still demonstrated a number of advantages on the part of Office 365. In this case, it showed off the support for a stylus to quickly edit a resume, and it utilized a connection to LinkedIn to add relevant skills and to send the finished resume out to recruiters. In the end it still had a notable lead, but as part of the advantage was due to the stylus, these results wouldn't be universal.


The final test using PowerPoint showed the smallest advantage on the part of Office 365 and it heavily relied on the stylus in order to achieve this. Realistically, it doesn't appear that you would have any significant advantage using Office 365's PowerPoint software on a PC that lacks a touch-screen display.

It's interesting to see that Microsoft is taking jabs at its own products, but it is clear that in many of these situations you would have an advantage using Office 365. Microsoft undoubtedly picked tests that it knew Office 365 would perform exceptionally well in, and these results need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but nonetheless these are still advantages that you wouldn't have otherwise.