More anti consumer garbage forced by a monopolistic juggernaut which the governments of the world refuse to do more than mildly scold. It’s worse than chatgpt and pops up almost everywhere you click. Something about heads in asses
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
They need money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
This decade for SURE! We promise!
It is. Remember when they just made a new version every 3 years and you didn’t REALLY need to buy the latest one if you had the previous one?
Well that didn’t make them enough money.
They still do that, though.
Yes, but you have to know that they do. They only advertise 365 on their website.
Excel has most businesses in a headlock. Can’t see why anyone else pays for M$. I have Office, but it’s a permanent license from my last job. When I upgrade, say bye bye.
Exactly, the only reason I have the subscription is for Excel and OneDrive. My NAS and home network is still not good enough to cover the backup needs of my whole family.
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that’s updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
the technical breakthrough of increasing shareholder value
As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I’m sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.
As for businesses that part stinks… once you get integrated with all the services offered, it’s going to take a lot to back out since it’s not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It’s awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn’t anticipate this then they didn’t do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.
Wait, they think people want Copilot? Like enough to pay money for it?
Copilot Is literally ChatGPT With a diff logo and name.
I use both for work, copilot is worse.
It’s “ENTERPRISE”
Copilot for Teams is extremely useful. Recap meetings and being able to search for specific parts. People hate on AI but in this case they are definitely downplaying the capabilities.
But to be fair I’m not the one paying the bill
If meetings are happening so long and going in so frequently that nobody can make sense of them without an ai summary, might I suggest there are too many meetings?
I say this as someone who used to work at a place that had meetings about meetings to figure out why so much time was wasted in meetings.
I mean we can debate root cause and corporate culture and everything, but at the end of the day these meetings exist and copilot make them better.
Man, I don’t know about even that… It gets stuff wrong all the time. My boss LOVES his AI bot that joins all meetings (even if he doesn’t) to summarize stuff. Occasionally I look over the summary it produces; it’s about 50% actually correct, 25% ambiguous not wrong but not what I meant, and 25% flat out wrong / opposite of what I meant. I’m sure he relies on the results, ugh. One time I went through the summary and corrected it all, but I don’t have time for that for all meetings.
Copilot in my experience is pretty accurate, even if not perfect. Plus it timestamps the meeting so you know where it’s drawing it’s conclusions from.
They are banking on customers being too invested in office to switch.
It’s a safe bet. I wonder if enterprise pricing is that high.
That with a side of suppressing a competitor. Similar to how they include Teams for corporate plans. If it is included in your M$ apps suite, then your company might want to cut back on Slack and just make due.
MS teams sucks so fucking much, I don’t understand how such a large company can make such a deficient product.
I think that might be their plan for all their products at this point. Just existing though inertia.
For reasons I won’t get into, I had a chance to peruse the training program for the sales force of Azure and their strategy actually is telling their potential clients that they already subscribe to Office 365 so they might as well use their cloud too.
Yeah, it does not surprise me. The thing that does is how common the approach seems to be in big established tech companies. I mean, it generally never works out (look at IBM, Intel, Sun, and to some degree Apple).
They don’t, but by providing a “classic tier” they get to kill anyone’s argument against it by saying “just don’t get it”, until they then discontinue the “classic tier” due to a “lack of demand”, and force Office users to have AI and pay for it too.
Makes me glad I continue to use the free Google and MS Office options and keep my cloud storage with a service that is dedicated to just storage.
Cuts down on all of the forced price increases due to the AI mess the MBAs need to justify the expense of.
apparently super easy to get it forever free
Not if you’re a company, since in order for it to remain free you need to disable certain telemetry files, and in some office there’s bound to be a person fucking things up, and then you’re on the hook big time.
COPILOT IS NOW A PAID FEATURE??? hell nah, microsoft be banking on their users.
Quickest enshittification.
Fr
For anyone who doesn’t already know the good FOSS alternatives:
- Local: Libreoffice
- Cloud/self-hosted: Nextcloud Office
FOSS GPT: GPT4ALL
additionally Onlyoffice (But Onlyoffice isnt fully open source)
OnlyOffice, you say?
😏
OnlyOffice doesn’t like open document formats though.
Oh
I’ve had nothing but issues administrating Office 365. A price hike like this is incentivizing me to push other products like Google workspace.
Nice parts are definitely user email tools and some of the audit tools, but I keep finding myself in scenarios where I get error 500s on the server side when I pop open dev tools and it’s like I don’t want to tell my users that they’re SOL but they sort of are if I can’t resolve some error on Microsoft’s o365 servers. Microsoft likes to ask what I did to fix the case if I fix it before they do and I just laugh and not rely to those. They can pay me extra for that or hire me if they want that info.
They should have made it opt-in instead of opt-out IMHO. You can still get the old subscription when you renew, but you have to jump through a couple of hoops. If you do nothing you just get “upgraded” for no reason.
Dolla dolla bill.
I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it’s 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.
Same here.
It hasn’t.
Think of all the new words made since 2007 you won’t be able to write on such an old version.
Like skibidi
Me too haha. One of the first things I install.
Microsoft probably added or changed unnecessary shit to the OOXML format that your old version can’t handle.
Do all documents open without any problems?
I will forever hate 2007’s ribbon with a passion.
Big corps will hang on regardless :/
why not just do:
microsoft 365: 6.99
microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99
Because they’re fucking stupid and thinks fucking over their customers brings in more profit.
You damn well know why they dont do that $$$
Moar profit.
They did exactly that, except they changed the name of the original subscription to “classic” and upgraded everyone to the more expensive plan without asking.
This is actually illegal in some countries, and I hope they get fined for it.
I’m sure they will get fined for it, and the fine will be considerably less than the extra money they take in from people who don’t notice…
why not just do:
microsoft 365: 6.99
microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99
Make the easy thing the better-for-sales thing, obviously.
But seriously, negative-approval has been a sales enabler for ever. People will often just roll over and accept it vs churning to something else. That’s why ‘loss-leader’ works, as people will start with one product and sunk-cost fallacy will keep them from churning as the vendor tightens the screw.
Hey guys, let’s stop ending prices in .99 in our social interactions.
It’s a relic that only exists to take advantage of people’s psychology. We shouldn’t be doing the dirty work for corporations.
Here, let me help:
why not just do:
microsoft 365: $7
microsoft 365 + copilot: $10
Don’t type more so you can help businesses fool people into thinking prices are lower than they actually are.
… second paragraph of the article:
In addition to the basic plans getting Copilot rolled in, there are now additional “Basic,” “Personal Classic,” and “Family Classic” tiers without Copilot and “other advanced features” added for users who do not use AI in their workflows
So Libre Office is free?
If it does what regular office suit does i would happily pay 300 dollars for it to have it as mine and not be fucked with
Free forever, and works great.
Is this your first exposure to FOSS? If so, you are in for a treat. There’s a whole world of free, open source software out there for you to enjoy.
Yeah, it’s 100% free.
Free and open source, but if you’re willing to pay, you could donate to the project.
the only problem with onlyoffice is that it’s electron.
Ehh, I’m fairly sure it’s not. It certainly wasn’t in the past. When do you believe that changed?Never mind, you were talking about OO, not LO, my bad.
https://forum.onlyoffice.com/t/why-does-it-contain-a-web-browser/8250/3
Chromium embedded framework, not electron. Similar concept, though.
Are you positive?
No, they’re negative.
Ew
Onlyoffice is apparently Russian, headquartered in Latvia.
Latvia is not Russia, unless something recently changed
JFC it can be russian owned and russian controlled and russian employed and pay russian taxes while “headquartered” in Latvia.
Latvia is not Russia
Yet.
And if you look on a Russian map, I’m sure it’s there already.
What? Latvia is a part of NATO.
what does it even mean to be russian then?
You know, almost entirely staffed by Russians (outside of Latvia), the executive suite is Russian, shareholders are Russian, etc.
Like have you guys never heard of companies being “headquartered” in the Cayman Islands?
Sure, now why would that be a factor for choosing a software or not.
You didn’t choose the country you were born in anymore than they did.
Seriously?
yes, very much
if your only argument is the nationality of the people involved, it’s a bad one.
If you haven’t noticed there’s a war going on. This is the weirdest conversation I’ve had, at best you’re playing the fool. I’m out.
I need to try onlyoffice again. The last time I tried, was the original beta, and it was faulty (being a first release beta, and all)
Oh onlyoffice works great! It’s spreadsheet function is far less buggy than excel and it’s smooth and snappy.
OnlyOffice spreadsheet has less functionality than Excel but unless you are a super power user then it’s not a problem.
Sweet! I’ve been using MS at work (required) and Libre at home (because screw MS). I’ll give Only another go!
Clippy is back!
If they dressed it up as Clippy I wouldn’t be mad, tbh.
GOZER The choice is made. The Traveller has come. VENKMAN We didn't choose anything?!! I didn't think of an image, did you? SPENGLER No. WINSTON My mind's a total void! [They all look at Ray] RAY I couldn't help it! It just popped in there! VENKMAN What? What just popped in there?It looks like you’re summoning a minor demon!
SPENGLER I have a radical idea... The door swings both ways. We could reverse the particle flow through the gate... RAY How? SPENGLER ... we'll resize a table in Word VENKMAN Excuse me, Egon. You said resizing a table was bad... RAY [with realisation] ... resize the table... VENKMAN You're going to endanger us. You're going to endanger our client; the nice lady who paid us in advance before she turned into a dog SPENGLER Not necessarily. There's definitely a very slim chance we'll survive.. WINSTON ... RAY ... VENKMAN I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! Let's do it!
Oh shit maybe we’ll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
This is for the personal licenses, not business or enterprise.
wack
Yeah. So it’s
- thunderbird
- some add-on
right? I forget the name of that add-on.
No, that’s not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that’s it. But it’s only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let’s ask Co-pilot again:
THERE it is.
But I learned there’s a second alternative, so that’s cool. See? Co-pilot has value!
Like using Edge to download Firefox, I approve
is there a thunderbird equivalent that looks like it was made after 1992?
Zentyal replaces windows server. It has active directory, file server, print server, domain controller and mail server, all in a way compatible with Microsofts products, but it’s Linux. I worked with it many years ago and it did what it says on the tin. I haven’t worked with newer versions.
In this case the AI is kinda wrong. It’s not a Thunderbird replacement in any way, rather an OWA replacement and Exchange alternative. You could use Thunderbird to connect to it probably.
What you could use is the Thunderbird extension TbSync, or Owl. Both work, but TbSync is free.
I keep seeing posts by NextCloud on Mastodon. Has anyone had any experience using those guys?
nextcloud is awesome, highly recommend.
Nextcloud is decent but it depends on what you want. Personally, I’d never use it again due to performance reasons but it’s a decent platform for cloud editing and stuff.
I switched to Syncthing for file management across my devices. With it, I can sync my Joplin notes. It’s all I need in life. It was also easier to set up than a Nextcloud instance.
