The problem is that consumers aren't all on board with SaaS; Windows 10 has been languishing below 30% market share for over a years since the Get Windows 10 Free campaign officially ended, and I guess Office 365 isn't exactly luring users away from free and easy options like Google's Drive suite of apps, because Microsoft have just announced that they're going to put out a stand-alone, non-SaaS SKU for those Luddites to buy and own in perpetuity, no monthly fees required.
As reported by Mark Hachman at PC World:
Microsoft would really like you to sign up for one of its productivity subscriptions: Office 365, or better yet, the new Microsoft 365. But for those old fogies who prefer standalone software, Microsoft announced Office 2019 on Tuesday.
Office 2019 will ship in the second half of 2018, Microsoft said, with a preview version scheduled for mid-2018. [...] Microsoft calls Office 2019 a suite of “perpetual” apps, because customers will pay for them with a one-time fee, rather than a recurring subscription.
This is how software used to be sold; a one-time transaction that companies like Microsoft have been trying to replace with perpetual bills for ages now. But Microsoft's desire to extract money from users every month in perpetuity clashed sharply with the simple reality that Office users really were not looking to learn to use a new "feature" of the software every other month.
Most businesses are looking for something that works, is easy to use, requires little or no maintenance, and doesn't bleed their bank accounts dry while delivering essentially nothing by way of additional value for that extra cost. And personal-use customers have even fewer reasons to buy into a subscription-based model for Office, especially with good-enough free options available.
The market has spoken, clearly and unambiguously, and it seems that Microsoft has finally been forced to listen to their customers. By promising a standalone version of Office, Microsoft is simply acknowledging reality, however grudgingly; by not having it ready until next year, though, Microsoft still stands to lose a lot of customers to competing products in the meantime.
On the plus side, this does give Microsoft a second chance to release a native UWP version of Office to their own store. It will be interesting to see whether Office 2019 runs natively in UWP, or is just another PCDAB port of a Win32 executable.