
According to Microsoft's support lifecycle site, Office LTSC 2021 will receive support to Oct. The most notable new limitation to this iteration? A dramatic decrease in support: Office LTSC 2021 will be supported for only five years, half the time of most past Office suites (and two years shorter than the truncated-before-launch Office 2019). It openly puts policies on perpetual license versions or limits what the software can do to push customers toward subscriptions. Microsoft vastly prefers customers opt for the subscription plans of those latter product names because the revenue is first, never-ending and second, regular and thus knowable (more or less) in advance).

These characteristics are just some of Office LTSC's that Microsoft has long used to cast the perpetual license as second-class (or even third-class) when compared to the rent-not-buy Office 365 and Microsoft 365.
