I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.
I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.
So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? That vendor lock-in is obviously part of the con (see for instance the complete and very deliberate lack of portability of documents created in OneNote, if you don't have the Professional/Enterprise version). And there are innumerable better services out there, many of which are even free.
We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore.
Microsoft 365.
Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
Job tracking system.
Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.
Freshdesk.
Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
Miro.
Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.
This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?
I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.
> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.
> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.
Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.
But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...
Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.
One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).
I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.
You clearly have never dealt with their support system(s).
You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s).
With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way...
With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is.
With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.
Google closing your account for some random reason. Their API's being maliciously compliant. Their systems being down. Browser/client compatibility issues. Network/connectivity issues, etc.
Users being stupid, using and holding it wrong, etc.
Just because you haven't had any bad experiences with Google, MS, Apple, etc doesn't mean it's a rosy world where everything works all the time.
Have you seen any reports of Google randomly closing business accounts? What do you think the reliability of Google’s servers compared to an in house managed server? Have you ever known GSuite not be available with Chrome?
As far as network/connectivity, how is that a Google problem if your office can’t connect to the internet?
we had this ~10 years ago where I was also the aforementioned IT guy for on-offboarding, doing whatever needs to be done for marketing, to set one more TXT record, to add one more email alias, to host one more PDF file, and so on.
because this is typical when you are at the size that you have a lot of SaaS subscriptions and you need to manage them, but still way too small to have institutional muscle memory (with semi-dedicated long-hauler folks, proper enterprise accounts with good separation of concerns/controls).
That’s not a technical problem or one unique to SaaS. Someone has to be responsible for onboarding and off boarding and making sure suppliers and vendors are paid.
A lot of the HR stuff ironically can also be handled by a PEO for small businesses.
While your employer as far as hiring, firing, internal management is your actual company. As far as health benefits and payroll taxes you are “co employed” by the PEO
If you have a company on O365 and don’t ever need IT support, you either have a very very small company or are living the dream surrounded by unicorns.
Something is broken at least every day or two and I’m on a full MS stack. Hopefully we manage to dump Teams in the near future and this’ll hopefully get significantly better. Teams is the bulk of the issues.
This list is a good summary. We have a lot of issues with logging in and two factor. Initial login and setup is particularly fraught.
And Teams. Everything.
My personal favourite is document format screw ups (‘corruption’ might be the right word) depending on which Word was used (app, browser, Teams Word). It’s such a shit product. Document footer problems and page numbering issues are a complete waste of my time.
Email notifications from your CRM stop getting delivered to your employee’s inboxes (which means your business is losing revenue). CRM vendor says ”problem isn’t on our end”. Hopefully someone at your company understands DNS and MX records and SPF records and SMTP headers in log files so you can go back to your CRM vendor and keep barking up the chain until you get someone who understands how Mailgun works so you can explain to them how to fix their problem.
When evaluating options, I’ve learned to ask myself the question, ”how do I fix this if it breaks?” If my answer is, ”it won’t ever break”, I’ve learned it’s always a red flag that says I don’t understand enough about that solution to support it, because everything can (and will) break.
This is a mail gun issue then isn’t it? Hosted email by Microsoft was one of the early SaaS products and the entire reason the original AJAX was created by Microsoft for IE
Yes, but it also wasn’t going to get fixed without in-house tech expertise.
Or flip it around. Your marketing is using Mailgun, and they just ran an expensive marketing campaign, but none of the emails are going out.
Or the marketing person says Mailgun sucks so they just send mass marketing emails from their work email and now your domain is on a blacklist.
An employee gets phished and their email sends out spam to all your vendors. Your main supplier blocks your domain until their IT can talk to your IT to confirm your IT has fixed the issue. ”we reset their password” isn’t going to cut it.
Your cybersecurity insurance renewal requires 2FA and geoblocking login attempts. Your office manager thinks they maybe figured it out, but now no one in your organization can login.
At the very least you need someone on retainer you can call. The cheapest option, if you can find one, is finding an IT consulting company that works on a time & materials basis. That way you aren’t paying continually but you’re not dead in the water when something breaks.
What I’ve observed is it becomes part of the job of the office admin person. So not zero headcount maybe 0.1 or 0.2 but that’s pretty good if the SaaS bill is another 0.2 headcount.
> but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.
That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.
Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model.
I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever.
IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals.
I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.
20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder.
Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web.
There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.
You absolutely can host your own mail server. Or use one of your IT partner of choice. Out business still has an exchange. Today you have to jump through some hurdles with SPIF/DKIM, but it is still very possible.
> it's cost competitive with all the other email providers
Have you looked at MXRoute? We pay $65 per year for unlimited domains and addresses. Not a huge amount of storage space so there's a bit of education in getting people to share large files using another service, but otherwise it's great value.
No serious company is going to go that route instead of using GSuite or O365. It doesn’t even offer an SSO solution that you can link to all of their other SaaS products.
And now they have to use another solution for file sharing?
I run a serious company and we have found MXRoute to be a great fit.
The main alternative that we could budget for (since we're an F&B business in Vietnam and many options are too expensive) is the Google Workspace lowest tier. That only gives 30gb per user which is shared between email and everything else, so it's not that different really. We'd still have to be making sure people were not sharing huge files by email.
It’s different because you also get the complete office suite from Google.
Are you really saying the difference between $6/month for the lowest tier that you said is affordable and $12/month for a shared 2TB pool of storage would break the bank?
Dunno about all other things, but it's totally possible to self-host email. I do it for myself, and I did it when running the IT of a media company.
I now work for the government, and I know that sensitive mails go through foreign entities and none can do anything about it because we lost not only the skills but the understanding that mail can be self-hosted.
This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!
> You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.
Going from relying on a subscription SaaS service to…still relying on a subscription *aaS service. And you still have the cost of keeping someone on staff to maintain the server and be available at 3am and 3pm.
Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add".
Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.
That sort of exists. You heard of home service plans? You pay a fixed fee to some provider, and they the cost to send a plumber/hvac guy/whatever if something breaks. For software, instead of getting your toilet unclogged, you get small features and bug fixes.
All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together.
So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment.
They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix.
Private equity is an underrated danger to society.
Had one (thankfully not (directly) paid for), we had a heatwave and AC died.
So I call...
They "are having trouble" finding someone for "emergency service". Their idea of "emergency service" is "we have a company that will be out there in four WEEKS".
So I found someone who could come out that day, for a surcharge. Reasonable. And the AC was dead. But this company were nice - the tech said "no promises, no commitments" and he did some shifty magic and got it running for about six more hours before it was permanently to the graveyard.
So we started getting quotes for a new HVAC system.
Responses from the plan:
- we won't pay if you don't use our suppliers
- we won't pay if you don't choose from our list of models (which were all low end, 80%, 1 stage systems)
- even if you use our supplier, we won't pay above $X. If they quote you higher, the difference is on you.
- if you used another contractor for ANY maintenance work on the existing system, we won't pay
- if the maintenance schedule wasn't followed (whether you owned the system/property at the time), we won't pay
There's a common phrase in each of those statements.
DIY it. Our dryer stopped heating, so I popped the screws off and it turns out the heating coil had burned out. Like $20 on Amazon. Our kitchen sink's faucet cracked and started leaking down the hose into the cabinet below so I bought a new one at Lowe's for like $20. Our oven stopped heating and the clock area where the control circuit is located kept clicking so I gave it a good smack like the primate I am. Free.
Too bad the heating coil wasn’t DRM paired with the dryer, forcing you to have to contact an official repair shop, we could have gouged you for way more than $20.
The "Uber for dogwalkers" service had a problem that people would do an arrangement with the dogwalker outside of its 30% (or whatever) rent-seeking, it even had scary clauses trying to prevent this.
So maybe the solution is to ask the electrician, etc, if you can contact them directly next time, and to ask them if they know any other tradespeople when you need one.
As comment below mentioned, DIY it. While the problem is "PE bad, hurr Durr", what usually happens is veteran plumbing, HVAC, etc businesses with loyal clientele get bought out for a pretty sum by the PE firm. I wouldn't fault them - why would you "work for yourself" when you could just take a nice 7 figure sum and retire or do something else? If your employees don't like it, they can go the same route and start their own thing - which will eventually get bought by PE too.
These are people who never had an exit opportunity before finally finding a way to sell their business for a nice lumpsum, instead of having to live job to job.
The only losers here are the customers and some of the employees, especially those who are undocumented.
> I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.
True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost.
Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable.
Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.
>I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.
You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette.
Contrary to what the propaganda wants you to think, I suspect the majority of people who have the brain to oppose are not opening every file that's sent to them by strangers.
The "majority" of people probably aren't clicking on untrusted links either, but we still advise people to keep their browsers up to date. Many people also need to open .docx files from strangers because it's part of their profession/business. Small business owners need to read RFPs and pay invoices, and jobseekers might need to open a questionnaire from a potential employer, all of which could be in .docx. The sender doesn't even have to be malicious. It's possible for one person, who's used to opening untrusted documents on a regular basis (eg. recruiter), to get infected, and for the malware to infect other documents that person sends to others (eg. finance).
That’s more of an issue with the network security then?
And even if computers didn’t exist, it still would make no sense to assume every single person is competent 100% of the time… at any company. Human beings are fallible, and that has to be factored in.
Huh, there must be(tm) a scanner for malware for these files. I know they're XML, although I wonder how much of it end up being base64-encoded binary blobs...
I've long felt that consumer acceptance of this pricing correlates with whether the subscription has a cost-of-good-sold component.
Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
>and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
You underestimate the technical sophistication of the average user. Even with perfect docs, there's going to be 1% (or whatever) of customers that call into technical support asking questions. That's essentially COGS.
Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support. In the same way, marketing costs vary wildly per sale and are very hard to attribute, which is why marketing is usually not a part of the COGS.
>Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support.
By that logic, do cloud companies need to factor storage costs into COGS? Most people don't store exactly 1TB when they get the 1TB plan, and many don't use anywhere near that amount. Does that mean dropbox can pretend their offering has 100% margins? Sounds unlikely. The principle of accounting is that the numbers should reflect the actual business. Customer support costs don't have to be allocated to sales with 100% accuracy, but they can't pretend it doesn't impact unit economics either.
Look, I'm not an accountant, if there's one here to correct me on this I'm keen to hear it. I can understand that it may be useful to associate customer support costs to accounts in some ways. It obviously impacts unit economics. But none of that is what COGS is about (again, marketing is a major factor in unit economics and not traditionally considered in COGS).
COGS is about me as a customer buying a widget, receiving a widget, and the seller having to have made me a widget. That's an incomplete view of a business, but incomplete views can still be very useful. Understanding customer support cost for example must be done over some time horizon, i.e. what's the 6 month post-purchase support cost, which means we don't know the cost for 6 months. COGS is known much faster.
As for whether it should include storage, or any other particular piece of technology, for a SaaS business, I guess that probably depends on the business. The important bit for accounting is the direct cost of providing the service. If you're renting out GPUs by the hour then clearly a GPU hour is a direct cost. If you're just hosting a web app and not selling any particular slice of infrastructure then that's probably not a direct cost. Fixed size plan storage is probably somewhere in the middle, although cloud storage is clearly a direct cost.
Still, my point is really that businesses should only use subscription pricing when there's ongoing COGS, because that's what people intuitively associate with ongoing value most of the time.
Stacksocial has been doing Office promos for years. They're inexpensive, forever licenses but I'd guess they aren't transferable. I've bought a dozen or two.
I see a lot of people complaining about this, what exactly is wrong with onedrive as opposed to Google drive or Dropbox? Haven't used Dropbox in many years. They all just sync files which is what I need them for.
I’m just one person. So take my opinion for what it is: just my opinion.
I started using Dropbox in high school and it has always “just worked”. I use the native app on Windows, iOS, and OSX. It’s essentially a virtual drive on all my devices and it backs up all my phone’s pictures and videos automatically. I can probably count on one hand the number of times Dropbox has annoyed me in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s overpriced, but at least it’s reliable. That’s worth a lot to me.
I experimented with Google drive as an alternative in college. It worked pretty well on android devices, but there was just enough friction on other OS’s that I abandoned it as a general file system. My g drive is basically just a graveyard of Google docs that I will never care to organize and random gmail attachments that ended up there for whatever reason.
Onedrive is by far the last choice I would make. My only experiences with it are (1) when Microsoft tries to force it on me/upsell me when I’m using office on my personal desktop or (2) when an employer uses it as their approved file sharing system. In my experience, it is consistently the least reliable of the three solutions. While Dropbox “just works”, I fully expect Onedrive to “just make me restart my computer, sign out and back in again, give up and just share the thing through slack.”
I used Dropbox until it stopped just working, added 3 device limit and gated the cloud drive feature under much more expensive teams plan. And switched to OneDrive.
Google drive app always was wonky and used filenames to store internal state (breaking for example Calibre database)
Office suites are particularly annoying as for a home user ... most people don't use much at all.
If it wasn't for the office sort of standard, you can get away with just not using an office suite, lots of good options out there. Free / surprisingly capable apps.
I'm weird and use TeX for my resume because I'm an annoying nerd, but I literally have not encountered an Office document in over a decade. I see Google workspace at work for my last couple jobs, and there's libreoffice if I occasionally want a spreadsheet at home. Everything I encounter from banks and governments is web or pdf these days.
Windows Enterprise edition has been subscription-only licensing for several years. The lowest edition cost is about twice that of Professional over a five year period.
For those unaware, if you want to use the latest Office Suite (2024), but don’t want to pay a monthly fee, Microsoft still offers a one time purchase [0] for $149.99 which is now cheaper than the (new) one year subscription (with no cloud storage of course).
One catch though is that this can only be installed on a single PC (and there's online activation, so it will actually check). So if you have a desktop and a laptop, you'll have to pay double, whereas subscription covers up to 5 devices, if I remember correctly.
I find it increasingly hard to justify any sort of SaaS subscription these days. Is the value you get out of Microsoft 365 really that much greater than any of the open source alternatives? So much better that you let a corporation dictate the terms of your computing environment?
It honestly makes me angry. And I say that as someone who works in the industry for a SaaS company. The only SaaS I reluctantly pay for is Fastmail and that's only because it's basically impossible to host your own email these days if you care about your email actually getting delivered to all those Gmail and Outlook inboxes out there.
Are you kidding me? For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / products. Let's list some major ones.
Exchange online with 100GB mailbox.
Onedrive with 1TB storage
Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user
Full desktop office applications
Full browser office applications
Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey
Teams
Planner
Bookings, so Calendly...
Anti-virus
MDM
MAM
Windows 10/11 Enterprise
AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations
A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this.
There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...
MS has a good deal on offer if you're an IT department looking to pay less for a suite of SaaS tools that would be more expensive as one-offs. But very little of this is appealing as an actual user. It's basically Office and an inconvenient to use 2TB of storage.
When someone is saying how they don't want to keep paying for SaaS it's almost certainly as an individual because businesses in a position to buy all this crap are large enough where this isn't even a blip.
It depends. If you need basic word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and email, you can definitely get by with alternatives. If you want more advanced functionality, you’re more likely to run into limitations or just things that work differently than what you might be used to. Microsoft 365 is not better in every way, but it’s a strong contender.
I suspect the familiarity and compatibility probably cinches it for a lot of people. Honestly, the convenience and familiarity are valuable, even if you and I would prefer open source options were more popular.
Microsoft 365 is good value, and it comes with many services. I wouldn’t have a personal license but it makes a lot of sense at work if you don’t mind sharing your data with USA.
I think the big tech companies have set standards so low that's it's often easy to look good by comparison. By the standards of big tech this is pretty small potstoes as egregious cash grabs go
Yes and…egregious doesn’t necessarily have to be a per-unit metric. A quick and poorly done google suggests close to 400 million paid 365 seats. It’s hard to know the business vs personal count so let’s halve it: that’s still $10 billion in new money coming in if those users don’t know they have a choice to not pay more.
I cannot think of a single non-business oriented user who needs MS365
Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago, business users are either using organizational licenses or are small-business users who aren't using family plans to begin with.
I'm mystified by who the affected audience is of this.
At university the school gave away Office for free to all students and we still all used Google Docs. Google ate Word's lunch by making the 99.99% experience waaay better.
My use case: for 100$/year, I can provide my family and my parents plenty of reliable cloud storage for their documents and pictures. With office suite thrown in as added bonus. I know of no other alternative that would provide equivalent of 6x1TB for such a low price.
I was also of that opinion for a while, but took the decision to move all things to a dedicated backup service instead. The lock-in with onedrive is palpable. So I swallowed the pill, downloaded all our files (very slowly...) and backed them up properly instead, with a service that will send me a hard drive with my files upon request.
I'm curious, what did you select, and how is the UX? With OneDrive, it looks like any other folder in your windows/mac computer, and the built in gallery of the Samsung phones my family uses will transparently sync to OneDrive. Other apps on Android can also "directly" access OneDrive files, but that sadly needs support from the app. And it all is available for access online via browser.
My main goal is to prevent data loss if a device is ever stolen / fails beyond repair. And being able to tell your non-technical family members to "put important documents within this folder" / "log in here if you need access outside your normal devices" is low enough of a barrier so that they actually do it.
In my sector of the business world in the US, every corporation pays for Office 365 for their employees. I don't know a single corporation that uses Google Docs.
Yep, our company uses Google Docs/Sheets. If someone wants an MS Office application, they have to prove that Google Docs/Sheets can't do what they need. So most of use Google and it's fine. I even like somethings in Sheets better than Excel (and vice versa).
M365 Personal or Family can actually have a place as cost-effective cloud storage that 'just works' for consumers that don't care to go down the self hosting rabbit hole. It happens to include an office apps suite, but even without that it's extremely price competitive with other consumer-focused cloud storage. For $6-7/month you get 1TB of online storage, or for $8.25-10/month you get up to 6TB. Their competition (Apple, Google, Dropbox) pretty much all start at $10/mo for 2TB, possibly with paying for a year in advance.
The business plans are a different matter, but can make sense particularly if you're actually paying salary/wages for someone to maintain and support a self-hosted alternative.
Sure but what do you actually use office for in your day to day home life?
I stopped paying for it in like 2010. I haven't needed to make a formatted document since college, and I graduated in 2006. Google sheets is quite good enough for my random spreadsheet usage.
UK Colleges and schools use MS, so students don't have much choice.
Some UK government stuff appears to be MS only, which really is awful. Of course it's Microsoft's "open" formats; so you can use FOSS alternatives but MS will screw up the formatting.
How’s that a surprise? Microsoft dangles npm, TypeScript, GitHub, and VSCode, and suddenly people develop collective amnesia about their past behavior.
TS, GitHub, VSCode and ChatGPT are going to make the EEE days look bush league. There's an entire new generation of programmers that have a visceral hatred for doing any unassisted programming or writing a single line of code they could have downloaded off NPM.
They're going to be 100% non functional when that stuff isn't around for them, so the industry can expect to get absolutely fucking raped when that bill comes due.
Would be a good time to invest in Microsoft if they weren't shitting the bed so badly on everything else.
To be fair, I doubt anyone working at a publication that has articles like "Ferry cancellations and delays: your rights" and "What to consider when joining a gym" on the front page knows about microsoft's involvement in npm, TypeScript, GitHub, or VSCode.
> Rather than sneaking an extra $5 a month, perhaps Microsoft should focus its efforts on making Copilot valuable enough that its customers will actually be willing to pay for it.
Someone at MS with a sleek haircut will hold a PPT demonstrating how both Copilot usage and subscription income went up.
So Microsoft believes it can only sell its AI application through a significant dark pattern. That isn't very convincing advertising for copilot at all.
If anyone would like to try an alternative to Copilot for Excel, I've been working on an addin that is designed more for advanced users who know what they want. It's currently free while it's in beta and I gather feedback to improve it.
It can be used to quickly add conditional formatting rules, charts, pivot tables, formulas, perform data manipulation tasks that you would have to use VBA for, etc. It's also private - it doesn't include the data in prompts, only metadata (table headers, etc).
I'm sending invites out as they are requested. You can request an invite here: https://www.incant.app/
This tactic is more common than you’d think. It usually goes like <amount> off the first period, regular price afterwards. Wait you want to cancel? How about this <amount> coupon for your next <period> as well? I’ve seen that many times.
I just use Libreoffice for home needs. My daughter has access to Libreoffice too but prefers to use Google docs for everything. I think there is a whole generation of students growing up on Google docs, mainly pushed by schools, and that will have some impact on office productivity space in another 10-15 years when they start to work.
Once upon a time Microsoft was forced to unbundle Explorer which they pushed bundled with Windows. I just wonder whether here we not again have Microsoft leveraging their office monopoly to gain market share by unfair means.
> That’s when a new option will miraculously appear – Microsoft 365 Classic, which has no price increase or Copilot AI. In other words, it’s your old plan.
I get why they bundle in the AI update and blame the cost on that ... but it would almost be interesting to see that if it was up front people would chose it if it was more transparent.
Less money overall maybe, but also tell you if people want it / see the value...
I think they tried that, but not enough people care enough about it to pay the higher price, and Microsoft needs to justify the amount of cash they’ve poured into generative AI. Hence why they’re raising prices to make everybody pay for it even if most users don’t want the features and don’t use them…
Bending Spoons is an Italian sweatshop with a ton of cash lying around. Anything they touch turns into poop, and as an employer, their reputation is terrible.
But somehow, they have a ton of cash influx that they use to acquire struggling businesses quite frequently.
Beside Evernote which I never used I like the word enpoopification which has nicer ring to it than enshittification.
I see just so much potential to it. It could be linkedIn profiles: Leader|Innovator|Enpooper . Enpoopies awards/badges on forums for questions or blogs like "How can/did we replace aging RabbitMQ setup with Kubernetes-Kafka-Cluster"
Would most folk notice any difference using Google Docs or iCloud docs for free? I don't get the rationale for paying for an word processor monthly. Is it the fuzzy, warm feeling that using Microsoft gives you?
I use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft 365. It is free and can load and save DOCX files. Plus I use LibreOffice in GNU/Linux so it is cross-platform and compatible.
I own a MS Silver Partner (int al). They (MS) are a handy place to stuff things for a while until something better comes along and I have lots of options. It takes a while to scale!
At the moment, dumping VMware is taking quite a lot of my time too.
I went to the trouble of looking up what that Silver Partner thing is. It means you're paying more than $1k to MS annually. You "own" a subscription? What does it do for you?
I still don't understand the rest of your comment.
It means you can resell Microsoft products with some reasonable level of margin. To be a Silver or Gold partner direct with Microsoft (vs 'indirect' partners through a distributor like Ingram) you're probably collecting that margin on US$10,000+ per month, possibly much more.
It means you can put "Microsoft Partner" on your sales and marketing communications and some people will throw money at you just for having that on your shingle.
In some cases businesses won't contract with anyone who doesn't have partner status.
I tend to write in markdown. If someone needs a Word Doc/docx whatever format they're using these days, I use pandoc to generate it. If someone sends me a docx file, I can read it with my choice of software without paying the MS tax.
On the very rare occasion someone sends me a docx file that they need me to edit and send back to them, I'll do it with whatever is handy and if they complain I messed up their formatting or whatever I can blame Word bugs.
the only reason Im still paying for M365 is that my grandpa can't use anything else than MS Word, despite of all the awful changes MS made to its UI thought out the years.
Old people stubborness can be interesting.
Maintening that subscription is a pain, as MS occasionally change default save location to SharePoint. I'm the sole admin and I've never touched any thing.
They have to keep jacking up prices so their SAFe(TM) certified trainers, scrum masters, coaches, consultants and such can continue to provide additional value
Makes me wonder what it would take for governments to actually hit Microsoft hard enough for it to hurt. I remember when they were hit with anti-trust fines here in the USA due to how they were bundling Internet Explorer as the default browser. I mean, did they ever stop? I can't recall ever turning on a new Windows install in the past couple decades and not having IE or Edge as the default.
It also makes me wonder what it would take for IT people to finally stop gritting their teeth about having to use, or having to let others use, Windows and start just dealing with the learning curve of switching to some Linux distro. I mean, Windows Recall is spyware. If it didn't come from Microsoft, Windows Defender would be sure to mark it as malicious... What's the name for a screenshot based keylogger I wonder...
I used to just figure that Windows was just all some people could use. And if that was the best tool for them, then ok. But now? I can't say that anymore. It's out and out malware at this point.
In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? Or is there something good about Windows that you like?
Things seem more complicated due to Visual Studio Code being cross-platform, and the fact that there's some extremely rudimentary support for consoles in Jetbrains tools, but there's no debugging support at all.
> In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS?
That’s not really a minor point. It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
Even for certain CAD software I use that has Mac and Windows versions, the Windows version feels so much more performant and responsive. I’ll switch to Windows for anything serious.
Also, YMMV, but in the past 5 or so years my Windows workstation has felt less buggy and more stable than my Macs. I’ve dealt with a lot of annoying quirks on the Mac over the years where the only solution is to wait for the next update and hope it’s fixed. Even today, accessing network file shares is incredibly buggy on Mac in certain cases.
I daily drive Linux for everything except games, and gaming on Linux has come far enough that I'll be switching over soon. My 60+ father also uses Linux for most of what he does.
And, yes, software working on your OS is not a minor point. That's the whole reason I used to go with the "best tool for the job" approach. Windows Recall is what changed that for me. I can't see using an OS with spyware built in as a "feature".
In my opinion, Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft, so...
> It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
So, the number of video editing, photo editing, CAD, gaming, and so on tools that work on Linux has grown a LOT. It's not just for basic stuff. You can do almost anything you need to on Desktop Linux. Yes, a lot of things are rough around the edges, but they're that way because people haven't invested in them, not because they're bad tools.
> But crucially, 365 plans don’t provide unlimited access to Copilot – that requires an extra $37/month subscription called Copilot Pro. Instead, the plans provide a bank of 60 credits per month, where each credit pays for one action that makes use of Copilot.
Wow I missed this part of the story. It’s incredibly shitty. The are basically making the whole world pay $5 a month for a _trial _ of Copilot ?
I have an even cheaper suggestion: doing like me, using org-mode for notes and small potatoes computation, Python for more complex stuff, rarely Maxima CAS, and LaTeX to produce documents. All these tools offer much bigger features set, much bigger flexibility, produce much better results and are FLOSS tools.
Seriously the MIT Missing Semester MUST be a high-schools mandatory course, anyone who want to have a non-mere-manual profession must have passed this course. We are in damn 2025, it's about time to recognize that computers are the mean of knowledge like papers and libraries before, not knowing how to use them properly means being illiterate, even with some PhDs.
Microsoft Partner Network. $500 a year includes five seats of Office 365 Enterprise and $100 a month in Azure credit. On top of Visual Studio Pro and a bunch of other perks.
Free isn’t the issue. Google’s office products are free, have mobile apps that work offline and while a desktop app isn’t a big deal for me, some who travel for work and use a laptop that may not have internet access all of the time - mostly on a plane - might care. WiFi is available on most planes and free with some airlines but is unreliable.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem, iWorks is free, has iOS and desktop versions for the Mac and a web version. But it’s the same argument for Windows users I had for GSuite.
The poster I replied to cares about open source I assume.
I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.
I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.
So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? That vendor lock-in is obviously part of the con (see for instance the complete and very deliberate lack of portability of documents created in OneNote, if you don't have the Professional/Enterprise version). And there are innumerable better services out there, many of which are even free.
We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore.
Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.
Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.
This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?
I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.
> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.
> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.
Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.
But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...
Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.
One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).
I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.
Out of interest, who's managing your mail, accounts, purchasing and computer setup now?
You pay $25 a seat to either Google (GSuite) or Microsoft. There is nothing to manage but signing into the account.
As far as computer purchasing, my latest employer had my computer shipped directly from Apple. Once I got it, I installed the mandated MDM software.
You clearly have never dealt with their support system(s).
You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s).
With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way...
With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is.
With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.
What do you think can “break” with logging in to your Google account and using GSuite? It’s basically the same thing as the consumer version.
It’s the same with O365.
Google closing your account for some random reason. Their API's being maliciously compliant. Their systems being down. Browser/client compatibility issues. Network/connectivity issues, etc.
Users being stupid, using and holding it wrong, etc.
Just because you haven't had any bad experiences with Google, MS, Apple, etc doesn't mean it's a rosy world where everything works all the time.
Have you seen any reports of Google randomly closing business accounts? What do you think the reliability of Google’s servers compared to an in house managed server? Have you ever known GSuite not be available with Chrome?
As far as network/connectivity, how is that a Google problem if your office can’t connect to the internet?
There are many ways in which a cloud suite can fail. I was the guy zie is talking about for many years though it was not my main job.
Can you name any of these ways in which a cloud suite can fail?
payment doesn't go through, for example.
because the CEO/founder's card has a limit.
we had this ~10 years ago where I was also the aforementioned IT guy for on-offboarding, doing whatever needs to be done for marketing, to set one more TXT record, to add one more email alias, to host one more PDF file, and so on.
because this is typical when you are at the size that you have a lot of SaaS subscriptions and you need to manage them, but still way too small to have institutional muscle memory (with semi-dedicated long-hauler folks, proper enterprise accounts with good separation of concerns/controls).
That’s not a technical problem or one unique to SaaS. Someone has to be responsible for onboarding and off boarding and making sure suppliers and vendors are paid.
A lot of the HR stuff ironically can also be handled by a PEO for small businesses.
https://www.rippling.com/aso
While your employer as far as hiring, firing, internal management is your actual company. As far as health benefits and payroll taxes you are “co employed” by the PEO
Misconfiguration and skill issues (aka poor docs).
IME not a big difference vs 99% of the failures of business IT systems in general...
> It’s the same with O365.
If you have a company on O365 and don’t ever need IT support, you either have a very very small company or are living the dream surrounded by unicorns.
Something is broken at least every day or two and I’m on a full MS stack. Hopefully we manage to dump Teams in the near future and this’ll hopefully get significantly better. Teams is the bulk of the issues.
And no one can say what exactly.
What has broken about using any of o365?
These are some I had over the last few months actually;
"I can't save outside of onedrive"
"My mails aren't getting delivered"
"My office suite has deactivated itself and won't reactivate"
"We need a shared mailbox for x,y,z"
"The new joiner can't access my onedrive/shared drive" (No groups/auto-groups - they require some more advanced administration or discipline).
"I received an email from someone impersonating the CEO asking for an invoice to be paid immediately"
"My Excel sheet is somehow not syncing to onedrive and now there's conflicts"
FD: We don't use Teams, and we migrated from o365 to GSuite, but there are some people who remain on o365 for Office reasons.
This list is a good summary. We have a lot of issues with logging in and two factor. Initial login and setup is particularly fraught.
And Teams. Everything. My personal favourite is document format screw ups (‘corruption’ might be the right word) depending on which Word was used (app, browser, Teams Word). It’s such a shit product. Document footer problems and page numbering issues are a complete waste of my time.
For teams there was a month where every single call it would lag out for 5+ seconds every minute or more. Just completely unusable.
Email notifications from your CRM stop getting delivered to your employee’s inboxes (which means your business is losing revenue). CRM vendor says ”problem isn’t on our end”. Hopefully someone at your company understands DNS and MX records and SPF records and SMTP headers in log files so you can go back to your CRM vendor and keep barking up the chain until you get someone who understands how Mailgun works so you can explain to them how to fix their problem.
When evaluating options, I’ve learned to ask myself the question, ”how do I fix this if it breaks?” If my answer is, ”it won’t ever break”, I’ve learned it’s always a red flag that says I don’t understand enough about that solution to support it, because everything can (and will) break.
This is a mail gun issue then isn’t it? Hosted email by Microsoft was one of the early SaaS products and the entire reason the original AJAX was created by Microsoft for IE
Yes, but it also wasn’t going to get fixed without in-house tech expertise.
Or flip it around. Your marketing is using Mailgun, and they just ran an expensive marketing campaign, but none of the emails are going out.
Or the marketing person says Mailgun sucks so they just send mass marketing emails from their work email and now your domain is on a blacklist.
An employee gets phished and their email sends out spam to all your vendors. Your main supplier blocks your domain until their IT can talk to your IT to confirm your IT has fixed the issue. ”we reset their password” isn’t going to cut it.
Your cybersecurity insurance renewal requires 2FA and geoblocking login attempts. Your office manager thinks they maybe figured it out, but now no one in your organization can login.
At the very least you need someone on retainer you can call. The cheapest option, if you can find one, is finding an IT consulting company that works on a time & materials basis. That way you aren’t paying continually but you’re not dead in the water when something breaks.
What I’ve observed is it becomes part of the job of the office admin person. So not zero headcount maybe 0.1 or 0.2 but that’s pretty good if the SaaS bill is another 0.2 headcount.
> but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.
That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.
“We” did no such thing. Major enterprises have been in bed with Microsoft since the late 90s.
Before that, they were running DOS on the client and Novell Netware on a server. Linux and “open source” has never been big in business.
Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model.
I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever.
IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals.
I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.
20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder.
Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web.
There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.
You absolutely can host your own mail server. Or use one of your IT partner of choice. Out business still has an exchange. Today you have to jump through some hurdles with SPIF/DKIM, but it is still very possible.
> it's cost competitive with all the other email providers
Have you looked at MXRoute? We pay $65 per year for unlimited domains and addresses. Not a huge amount of storage space so there's a bit of education in getting people to share large files using another service, but otherwise it's great value.
No serious company is going to go that route instead of using GSuite or O365. It doesn’t even offer an SSO solution that you can link to all of their other SaaS products.
And now they have to use another solution for file sharing?
I run a serious company and we have found MXRoute to be a great fit.
The main alternative that we could budget for (since we're an F&B business in Vietnam and many options are too expensive) is the Google Workspace lowest tier. That only gives 30gb per user which is shared between email and everything else, so it's not that different really. We'd still have to be making sure people were not sharing huge files by email.
It’s different because you also get the complete office suite from Google.
Are you really saying the difference between $6/month for the lowest tier that you said is affordable and $12/month for a shared 2TB pool of storage would break the bank?
> I write this while holding back tears (:/)
Dunno about all other things, but it's totally possible to self-host email. I do it for myself, and I did it when running the IT of a media company.
I now work for the government, and I know that sensitive mails go through foreign entities and none can do anything about it because we lost not only the skills but the understanding that mail can be self-hosted.
This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!
Softwarelizenzverschlimmbesserung
“Verschlimmbesserung” is a great German word that describes “an attempted improvement that actually makes things worse”.
Digitalisierungsschattenpreise
As a German, I approve this wording.
Basically, it's a Digitalisierungsschattenwucherbepreisungsskandal
To save some folks a few clicks, "Digitization Shadow Prices".
This isn't a real word (yet) of course (at least no Google hits). Just made it up on the spot.
I'm German and I wasn't sure if you made it up or if it existed before. :)
> you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
Email saas vendor only lock-in seem to be the root of some vendor lock-ins.
> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.
> I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing
Why not self-hosted alternatives?
> Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I find that hard to believe. Even cloud backup services are not that expensive.
> You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.
Going from relying on a subscription SaaS service to…still relying on a subscription *aaS service. And you still have the cost of keeping someone on staff to maintain the server and be available at 3am and 3pm.
Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add".
Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.
That sort of exists. You heard of home service plans? You pay a fixed fee to some provider, and they the cost to send a plumber/hvac guy/whatever if something breaks. For software, instead of getting your toilet unclogged, you get small features and bug fixes.
Exactly this.
All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together.
So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment.
They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix.
Private equity is an underrated danger to society.
Had one (thankfully not (directly) paid for), we had a heatwave and AC died.
So I call...
They "are having trouble" finding someone for "emergency service". Their idea of "emergency service" is "we have a company that will be out there in four WEEKS".
So I found someone who could come out that day, for a surcharge. Reasonable. And the AC was dead. But this company were nice - the tech said "no promises, no commitments" and he did some shifty magic and got it running for about six more hours before it was permanently to the graveyard.
So we started getting quotes for a new HVAC system.
Responses from the plan:
- we won't pay if you don't use our suppliers
- we won't pay if you don't choose from our list of models (which were all low end, 80%, 1 stage systems)
- even if you use our supplier, we won't pay above $X. If they quote you higher, the difference is on you.
- if you used another contractor for ANY maintenance work on the existing system, we won't pay
- if the maintenance schedule wasn't followed (whether you owned the system/property at the time), we won't pay
There's a common phrase in each of those statements.
Any way we could fight this? It seems things are getting worse and worse and I don’t see any solution
DIY it. Our dryer stopped heating, so I popped the screws off and it turns out the heating coil had burned out. Like $20 on Amazon. Our kitchen sink's faucet cracked and started leaking down the hose into the cabinet below so I bought a new one at Lowe's for like $20. Our oven stopped heating and the clock area where the control circuit is located kept clicking so I gave it a good smack like the primate I am. Free.
Too bad the heating coil wasn’t DRM paired with the dryer, forcing you to have to contact an official repair shop, we could have gouged you for way more than $20.
The "Uber for dogwalkers" service had a problem that people would do an arrangement with the dogwalker outside of its 30% (or whatever) rent-seeking, it even had scary clauses trying to prevent this.
So maybe the solution is to ask the electrician, etc, if you can contact them directly next time, and to ask them if they know any other tradespeople when you need one.
Done this with a similar service, worked fine. Of course YMMV and not everyone is open to it.
Become a plumber
As comment below mentioned, DIY it. While the problem is "PE bad, hurr Durr", what usually happens is veteran plumbing, HVAC, etc businesses with loyal clientele get bought out for a pretty sum by the PE firm. I wouldn't fault them - why would you "work for yourself" when you could just take a nice 7 figure sum and retire or do something else? If your employees don't like it, they can go the same route and start their own thing - which will eventually get bought by PE too.
These are people who never had an exit opportunity before finally finding a way to sell their business for a nice lumpsum, instead of having to live job to job.
The only losers here are the customers and some of the employees, especially those who are undocumented.
Worse than that, they change the design and location of the handle every other year, and then replace your toilet paper with 3 sea shells.
Before we downsized from our home to our condo, I had a home gym with a treadmill, elliptical and a rower and I paid a fee each year for maintenance.
With so many moving parts and sweat getting on parts, things always needed replacing.
Also when I did have our home we paid service contracts for the yard, the weeds, termites and pest control.
When we turned it into a rental before we sold it, we also had a monthly home warranty.
But, in the case of MS Office, unlike Adobe, they still sell a copy with a perpetual license that you only pay for once.
> I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.
True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost.
Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable.
Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.
>I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.
You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette.
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide filter for "office"
untrusted docx/xlsx file
Contrary to what the propaganda wants you to think, I suspect the majority of people who have the brain to oppose are not opening every file that's sent to them by strangers.
The "majority" of people probably aren't clicking on untrusted links either, but we still advise people to keep their browsers up to date. Many people also need to open .docx files from strangers because it's part of their profession/business. Small business owners need to read RFPs and pay invoices, and jobseekers might need to open a questionnaire from a potential employer, all of which could be in .docx. The sender doesn't even have to be malicious. It's possible for one person, who's used to opening untrusted documents on a regular basis (eg. recruiter), to get infected, and for the malware to infect other documents that person sends to others (eg. finance).
That’s more of an issue with the network security then?
And even if computers didn’t exist, it still would make no sense to assume every single person is competent 100% of the time… at any company. Human beings are fallible, and that has to be factored in.
Huh, there must be(tm) a scanner for malware for these files. I know they're XML, although I wonder how much of it end up being base64-encoded binary blobs...
I've long felt that consumer acceptance of this pricing correlates with whether the subscription has a cost-of-good-sold component.
Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
>and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
You underestimate the technical sophistication of the average user. Even with perfect docs, there's going to be 1% (or whatever) of customers that call into technical support asking questions. That's essentially COGS.
Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support. In the same way, marketing costs vary wildly per sale and are very hard to attribute, which is why marketing is usually not a part of the COGS.
>Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support.
By that logic, do cloud companies need to factor storage costs into COGS? Most people don't store exactly 1TB when they get the 1TB plan, and many don't use anywhere near that amount. Does that mean dropbox can pretend their offering has 100% margins? Sounds unlikely. The principle of accounting is that the numbers should reflect the actual business. Customer support costs don't have to be allocated to sales with 100% accuracy, but they can't pretend it doesn't impact unit economics either.
Look, I'm not an accountant, if there's one here to correct me on this I'm keen to hear it. I can understand that it may be useful to associate customer support costs to accounts in some ways. It obviously impacts unit economics. But none of that is what COGS is about (again, marketing is a major factor in unit economics and not traditionally considered in COGS).
COGS is about me as a customer buying a widget, receiving a widget, and the seller having to have made me a widget. That's an incomplete view of a business, but incomplete views can still be very useful. Understanding customer support cost for example must be done over some time horizon, i.e. what's the 6 month post-purchase support cost, which means we don't know the cost for 6 months. COGS is known much faster.
As for whether it should include storage, or any other particular piece of technology, for a SaaS business, I guess that probably depends on the business. The important bit for accounting is the direct cost of providing the service. If you're renting out GPUs by the hour then clearly a GPU hour is a direct cost. If you're just hosting a web app and not selling any particular slice of infrastructure then that's probably not a direct cost. Fixed size plan storage is probably somewhere in the middle, although cloud storage is clearly a direct cost.
Still, my point is really that businesses should only use subscription pricing when there's ongoing COGS, because that's what people intuitively associate with ongoing value most of the time.
Dropbox’s 2TB plan is $120. Office 365 is $129 with 1TB each for 6 users.
And you get anti-virus and credit monitoring with that...
You can still buy Office 2024 as a proper app without any of that cloud stuff if you want to.
And what if I want it as a program instead? :)
You mean floppies, right? Yeah, like a stack of 26 floppies that you can own and use forever.
Could you please point me where to buy it?
Stacksocial has been doing Office promos for years. They're inexpensive, forever licenses but I'd guess they aren't transferable. I've bought a dozen or two.
https://www.stacksocial.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=offi...
Techspot has deals on Office 2024. https://www.techspot.com/news/96637-microsoft-office-lifetim...
Wasn't aware of these sort of deals.. would love something like this for the Adobe suite.
The ultra cheap ones are grey market. Someone reselling something they are technically not supposed to.
Stacksocial looks like one of those many dodgy sites selling licenses of questionable origin
How can you be sure they are bona fide Microsoft licenses?
Stacksocial originated that style of selling discounted licenses I think. Been using them for years also
That doesn't answer my question
I'll go out on a limb and just claim they're grey market. Someone can prove me wrong
It's the item in the third column: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...
It's available through Costco. I'm sure Amazon and other similar retailers have it as well. 2024 Version.
Woot has licenses for sale every so often. About $30 for the 2021 version the last time I noticed.
> So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost?
OneDrive Family plan is still the cheapest and largest cloud storage (6TB of cloud storage for $99/year).
Yeah, but then you have to use onedrive…
I see a lot of people complaining about this, what exactly is wrong with onedrive as opposed to Google drive or Dropbox? Haven't used Dropbox in many years. They all just sync files which is what I need them for.
I’m just one person. So take my opinion for what it is: just my opinion.
I started using Dropbox in high school and it has always “just worked”. I use the native app on Windows, iOS, and OSX. It’s essentially a virtual drive on all my devices and it backs up all my phone’s pictures and videos automatically. I can probably count on one hand the number of times Dropbox has annoyed me in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s overpriced, but at least it’s reliable. That’s worth a lot to me.
I experimented with Google drive as an alternative in college. It worked pretty well on android devices, but there was just enough friction on other OS’s that I abandoned it as a general file system. My g drive is basically just a graveyard of Google docs that I will never care to organize and random gmail attachments that ended up there for whatever reason.
Onedrive is by far the last choice I would make. My only experiences with it are (1) when Microsoft tries to force it on me/upsell me when I’m using office on my personal desktop or (2) when an employer uses it as their approved file sharing system. In my experience, it is consistently the least reliable of the three solutions. While Dropbox “just works”, I fully expect Onedrive to “just make me restart my computer, sign out and back in again, give up and just share the thing through slack.”
Again, just my experience.
I used Dropbox until it stopped just working, added 3 device limit and gated the cloud drive feature under much more expensive teams plan. And switched to OneDrive. Google drive app always was wonky and used filenames to store internal state (breaking for example Calibre database)
OneDrive works perfectly on my Mac and iOS devices.
Office suites are particularly annoying as for a home user ... most people don't use much at all.
If it wasn't for the office sort of standard, you can get away with just not using an office suite, lots of good options out there. Free / surprisingly capable apps.
I'm weird and use TeX for my resume because I'm an annoying nerd, but I literally have not encountered an Office document in over a decade. I see Google workspace at work for my last couple jobs, and there's libreoffice if I occasionally want a spreadsheet at home. Everything I encounter from banks and governments is web or pdf these days.
For personal stuff I agree, I haven't found an office suite necessary.
A few gigs?
It is (or was) cheaper to signup for 365 than by the same storage in dropbox. It is cheaper to get that package than get Zoom.
So we should pay google engineers for making a saas app.
But we should fire microsoft engineers for making a cost efficient binary.
Not saying that's wrong, just reframing.
Also this debate is so 2000s, we've been over this, things need updates, for security at least. Who's gonna pay for it.
Windows Enterprise edition has been subscription-only licensing for several years. The lowest edition cost is about twice that of Professional over a five year period.
You can still buy the latest Office for personal use with a one-time purchase.
Do you mean "more appropriate for" businesses? Because 365 is definitely targeted at individuals, nation states, and everything in between.
Microsoft's home page is advertising Microsoft 365 "For 1 person" literally as I type this!
Office 365 is very much targeted at personal users, as well. I mean, it literally has a "personal" plan (and also a "family" plan).
For those unaware, if you want to use the latest Office Suite (2024), but don’t want to pay a monthly fee, Microsoft still offers a one time purchase [0] for $149.99 which is now cheaper than the (new) one year subscription (with no cloud storage of course).
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
One catch though is that this can only be installed on a single PC (and there's online activation, so it will actually check). So if you have a desktop and a laptop, you'll have to pay double, whereas subscription covers up to 5 devices, if I remember correctly.
5 years down the road that deal looks a lot less worth it.
Depends if you use the cloud storage. 6TB of cloud storage for $99/yr with the standard Office Suite thrown in isn't too bad.
But also you'll have 5-year-old software that doesn't run on Windows 13.
Does this have the crippled version of AutoSave that only works with OneDrive?
Wow, that really is shit.
Hey Microsoft PMs, here's a feature for you: "Want to save to disk? Add the 'Save to Disk'-subscription, just $2/month!".
I found a way to disable that deep in settings.
Please share!
> For non-commercial use
What the hell
That's for the Home version, the business one is here (and $100 more expensive):
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
And it includes Outlook.
It's not free software. What did you expect? There's a reason the Free Software Foundation added freedom 0:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
Thanks for linking it! Looks like it is just a license for a single machine. So that still hurts :/
I find it increasingly hard to justify any sort of SaaS subscription these days. Is the value you get out of Microsoft 365 really that much greater than any of the open source alternatives? So much better that you let a corporation dictate the terms of your computing environment?
It honestly makes me angry. And I say that as someone who works in the industry for a SaaS company. The only SaaS I reluctantly pay for is Fastmail and that's only because it's basically impossible to host your own email these days if you care about your email actually getting delivered to all those Gmail and Outlook inboxes out there.
Are you kidding me? For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / products. Let's list some major ones.
Exchange online with 100GB mailbox. Onedrive with 1TB storage Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user Full desktop office applications Full browser office applications Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey Teams Planner Bookings, so Calendly... Anti-virus MDM MAM Windows 10/11 Enterprise AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this.
There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...
> For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / product
How many of those do you use?
> adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO
They now have a $10/mo plan where you pick any one application.
MS has a good deal on offer if you're an IT department looking to pay less for a suite of SaaS tools that would be more expensive as one-offs. But very little of this is appealing as an actual user. It's basically Office and an inconvenient to use 2TB of storage.
When someone is saying how they don't want to keep paying for SaaS it's almost certainly as an individual because businesses in a position to buy all this crap are large enough where this isn't even a blip.
It depends. If you need basic word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and email, you can definitely get by with alternatives. If you want more advanced functionality, you’re more likely to run into limitations or just things that work differently than what you might be used to. Microsoft 365 is not better in every way, but it’s a strong contender.
I suspect the familiarity and compatibility probably cinches it for a lot of people. Honestly, the convenience and familiarity are valuable, even if you and I would prefer open source options were more popular.
Microsoft 365 is good value, and it comes with many services. I wouldn’t have a personal license but it makes a lot of sense at work if you don’t mind sharing your data with USA.
Notice the glowing pr articles about how Satya’s Microsoft is so amazing and not like the old chiseling for cash Microsoft are gone.
Time to collect the rent, peasants.
Today's microsoft is exactly what yesterday's microsoft always wanted to be; software subscriptions have been the goal for decades.
I think the big tech companies have set standards so low that's it's often easy to look good by comparison. By the standards of big tech this is pretty small potstoes as egregious cash grabs go
Yes and…egregious doesn’t necessarily have to be a per-unit metric. A quick and poorly done google suggests close to 400 million paid 365 seats. It’s hard to know the business vs personal count so let’s halve it: that’s still $10 billion in new money coming in if those users don’t know they have a choice to not pay more.
I cannot think of a single non-business oriented user who needs MS365
Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago, business users are either using organizational licenses or are small-business users who aren't using family plans to begin with.
I'm mystified by who the affected audience is of this.
"Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago"
Of all the things that didn't happen, this didn't happen the most.
It absolutely happened. But people didn't move to open source solutions. They moved to Google docs.
At university the school gave away Office for free to all students and we still all used Google Docs. Google ate Word's lunch by making the 99.99% experience waaay better.
Not really. All the non tech folks I know just the free version of Google office suite for the handful of letters and spreadsheets they create a year.
My use case: for 100$/year, I can provide my family and my parents plenty of reliable cloud storage for their documents and pictures. With office suite thrown in as added bonus. I know of no other alternative that would provide equivalent of 6x1TB for such a low price.
I was also of that opinion for a while, but took the decision to move all things to a dedicated backup service instead. The lock-in with onedrive is palpable. So I swallowed the pill, downloaded all our files (very slowly...) and backed them up properly instead, with a service that will send me a hard drive with my files upon request.
I'm curious, what did you select, and how is the UX? With OneDrive, it looks like any other folder in your windows/mac computer, and the built in gallery of the Samsung phones my family uses will transparently sync to OneDrive. Other apps on Android can also "directly" access OneDrive files, but that sadly needs support from the app. And it all is available for access online via browser.
My main goal is to prevent data loss if a device is ever stolen / fails beyond repair. And being able to tell your non-technical family members to "put important documents within this folder" / "log in here if you need access outside your normal devices" is low enough of a barrier so that they actually do it.
Nobody moved to free alternatives. All the normies pay for Office. The cheapskates pirate it. The whole world runs on Office.
I don't know any individual that pay for office. Google Docs is good enough for 90% of things and free.
In my sector of the business world in the US, every corporation pays for Office 365 for their employees. I don't know a single corporation that uses Google Docs.
The "free" alternative is Google Docs and friends.
Lots of people who don't need "business" office just use that, and even some businesses do.
Yep, our company uses Google Docs/Sheets. If someone wants an MS Office application, they have to prove that Google Docs/Sheets can't do what they need. So most of use Google and it's fine. I even like somethings in Sheets better than Excel (and vice versa).
I think that's an exaggeration, I know a few Google school districts and companies.
I know several attorneys that still use Corel.
M365 Personal or Family can actually have a place as cost-effective cloud storage that 'just works' for consumers that don't care to go down the self hosting rabbit hole. It happens to include an office apps suite, but even without that it's extremely price competitive with other consumer-focused cloud storage. For $6-7/month you get 1TB of online storage, or for $8.25-10/month you get up to 6TB. Their competition (Apple, Google, Dropbox) pretty much all start at $10/mo for 2TB, possibly with paying for a year in advance.
The business plans are a different matter, but can make sense particularly if you're actually paying salary/wages for someone to maintain and support a self-hosted alternative.
For $129 a year I get:
- Office apps for all of my devices - Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web
- 1 TB of cloud storage
And then I get both each for up to 6 users.
Dropbox’s 2TB storage plan by itself is $120 a year.
GSuite is okay and it’s our corporate standard. But it is nowhere near as good as Office
Sure but what do you actually use office for in your day to day home life?
I stopped paying for it in like 2010. I haven't needed to make a formatted document since college, and I graduated in 2006. Google sheets is quite good enough for my random spreadsheet usage.
Honestly, I only use Office365 to update my Resume maybe once per quarter.
I use OneDrive all of the time and it’s one of the three cloud backup solutions I have for Photos - Google Drive and iCloud being the other two.
But my Mom is one of the six users and my wife is another one and they use Word and Excel all of the time.
My mom is 80, a retired school teacher and has been using word processors and spreadsheets since we had AppleWorks for the Apple //e in the mid 80s.
UK Colleges and schools use MS, so students don't have much choice.
Some UK government stuff appears to be MS only, which really is awful. Of course it's Microsoft's "open" formats; so you can use FOSS alternatives but MS will screw up the formatting.
Where can I get the free 1TB cloud storage with versioning/delete protection?
Enjoy your featureless spam bucket.
How’s that a surprise? Microsoft dangles npm, TypeScript, GitHub, and VSCode, and suddenly people develop collective amnesia about their past behavior.
TS, GitHub, VSCode and ChatGPT are going to make the EEE days look bush league. There's an entire new generation of programmers that have a visceral hatred for doing any unassisted programming or writing a single line of code they could have downloaded off NPM.
They're going to be 100% non functional when that stuff isn't around for them, so the industry can expect to get absolutely fucking raped when that bill comes due.
Would be a good time to invest in Microsoft if they weren't shitting the bed so badly on everything else.
To be fair, I doubt anyone working at a publication that has articles like "Ferry cancellations and delays: your rights" and "What to consider when joining a gym" on the front page knows about microsoft's involvement in npm, TypeScript, GitHub, or VSCode.
Those two titles are funny as hell
> Rather than sneaking an extra $5 a month, perhaps Microsoft should focus its efforts on making Copilot valuable enough that its customers will actually be willing to pay for it.
Someone at MS with a sleek haircut will hold a PPT demonstrating how both Copilot usage and subscription income went up.
So Microsoft believes it can only sell its AI application through a significant dark pattern. That isn't very convincing advertising for copilot at all.
If anyone would like to try an alternative to Copilot for Excel, I've been working on an addin that is designed more for advanced users who know what they want. It's currently free while it's in beta and I gather feedback to improve it.
It can be used to quickly add conditional formatting rules, charts, pivot tables, formulas, perform data manipulation tasks that you would have to use VBA for, etc. It's also private - it doesn't include the data in prompts, only metadata (table headers, etc).
I'm sending invites out as they are requested. You can request an invite here: https://www.incant.app/
This tactic is more common than you’d think. It usually goes like <amount> off the first period, regular price afterwards. Wait you want to cancel? How about this <amount> coupon for your next <period> as well? I’ve seen that many times.
"Frankly, we feel this is a flagrant breach of goodwill and trust for Microsoft’s customers"
Clearly they haven't been Microsoft customers very long, if there's still goodwill and trust.
Wait till you find out about Microsoft Dynamics 365 increasing their dataverse storage from US$9.95 to US$40 per GB/month!
Pirating Office is as simple as downloading a GitHub script. Microsoft stopped giving a shit about it. Enterprise will pay.
I just use Libreoffice for home needs. My daughter has access to Libreoffice too but prefers to use Google docs for everything. I think there is a whole generation of students growing up on Google docs, mainly pushed by schools, and that will have some impact on office productivity space in another 10-15 years when they start to work.
Once upon a time Microsoft was forced to unbundle Explorer which they pushed bundled with Windows. I just wonder whether here we not again have Microsoft leveraging their office monopoly to gain market share by unfair means.
> That’s when a new option will miraculously appear – Microsoft 365 Classic, which has no price increase or Copilot AI. In other words, it’s your old plan.
That seems almost malicious
I get why they bundle in the AI update and blame the cost on that ... but it would almost be interesting to see that if it was up front people would chose it if it was more transparent.
Less money overall maybe, but also tell you if people want it / see the value...
I think they tried that, but not enough people care enough about it to pay the higher price, and Microsoft needs to justify the amount of cash they’ve poured into generative AI. Hence why they’re raising prices to make everybody pay for it even if most users don’t want the features and don’t use them…
Same tactic for the Evernote increase. Finally dumped it for Joplin and haven't looked back.
Evernote also had an ownership change as they were sold to Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons then moved development to Europe and raised prices.
Bending Spoons is an Italian sweatshop with a ton of cash lying around. Anything they touch turns into poop, and as an employer, their reputation is terrible.
But somehow, they have a ton of cash influx that they use to acquire struggling businesses quite frequently.
The enpoopification of Evernote was already well underway by the time they acquired it.
https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/14/evernote_api_limits/
Evernote used to be a one-of-a-kind product. It made a lot of key people filthy rich, and then it sort of lost traction.
I was listening to Gergely Orosz’s podcast[1] on Bending Spoons and found out that Evernote’s codebase was a complete mess and beyond repair.
[1]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
Beside Evernote which I never used I like the word enpoopification which has nicer ring to it than enshittification.
I see just so much potential to it. It could be linkedIn profiles: Leader|Innovator|Enpooper . Enpoopies awards/badges on forums for questions or blogs like "How can/did we replace aging RabbitMQ setup with Kubernetes-Kafka-Cluster"
Would most folk notice any difference using Google Docs or iCloud docs for free? I don't get the rationale for paying for an word processor monthly. Is it the fuzzy, warm feeling that using Microsoft gives you?
I use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft 365. It is free and can load and save DOCX files. Plus I use LibreOffice in GNU/Linux so it is cross-platform and compatible.
In the web side of things, collabora has gotten so much better as well, see by yourself: https://demo.filestash.app/login?type=tmp&next=/view/tmp.doc...
Maybe it just isn't optimized for Safari, but it was very sluggish the moment I opened it on my M4 Pro MacBook, which isn't promising.
LibreOffice is excellent. An alternate to it is OnlyOffice, which is a bit more polished (and Enterprisy) and has a free option too - https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx
I own a MS Silver Partner (int al). They (MS) are a handy place to stuff things for a while until something better comes along and I have lots of options. It takes a while to scale!
At the moment, dumping VMware is taking quite a lot of my time too.
I went to the trouble of looking up what that Silver Partner thing is. It means you're paying more than $1k to MS annually. You "own" a subscription? What does it do for you?
I still don't understand the rest of your comment.
It means you can resell Microsoft products with some reasonable level of margin. To be a Silver or Gold partner direct with Microsoft (vs 'indirect' partners through a distributor like Ingram) you're probably collecting that margin on US$10,000+ per month, possibly much more.
> What does it do for you?
It means you can put "Microsoft Partner" on your sales and marketing communications and some people will throw money at you just for having that on your shingle. In some cases businesses won't contract with anyone who doesn't have partner status.
does libreoffice actually work with doc/docx well?
I remember I tried this years ago, and it broke all the formatting that other window users see.
And it doesn’t run on iPhones, iPads and I just can’t use it on the web like I can with GSuite, Office or even Apple’s iWorks
I tend to write in markdown. If someone needs a Word Doc/docx whatever format they're using these days, I use pandoc to generate it. If someone sends me a docx file, I can read it with my choice of software without paying the MS tax. On the very rare occasion someone sends me a docx file that they need me to edit and send back to them, I'll do it with whatever is handy and if they complain I messed up their formatting or whatever I can blame Word bugs.
the only reason Im still paying for M365 is that my grandpa can't use anything else than MS Word, despite of all the awful changes MS made to its UI thought out the years.
Old people stubborness can be interesting.
Maintening that subscription is a pain, as MS occasionally change default save location to SharePoint. I'm the sole admin and I've never touched any thing.
> despite of all the awful changes MS made to its UI thought out the years
Which ones?
They have to keep jacking up prices so their SAFe(TM) certified trainers, scrum masters, coaches, consultants and such can continue to provide additional value
Makes me wonder what it would take for governments to actually hit Microsoft hard enough for it to hurt. I remember when they were hit with anti-trust fines here in the USA due to how they were bundling Internet Explorer as the default browser. I mean, did they ever stop? I can't recall ever turning on a new Windows install in the past couple decades and not having IE or Edge as the default.
It also makes me wonder what it would take for IT people to finally stop gritting their teeth about having to use, or having to let others use, Windows and start just dealing with the learning curve of switching to some Linux distro. I mean, Windows Recall is spyware. If it didn't come from Microsoft, Windows Defender would be sure to mark it as malicious... What's the name for a screenshot based keylogger I wonder...
I used to just figure that Windows was just all some people could use. And if that was the best tool for them, then ok. But now? I can't say that anymore. It's out and out malware at this point.
In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? Or is there something good about Windows that you like?
I work in gamedev, it's defacto Windows only.
Unreal Engine supports Linux/MacOS, Perforce supports Linux/MacOS.
So, you'd imagine that it would be fine.
Yet UGS (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...) and Playstation/Xbox development tools only work on Windows, and especially focus on Visual Studio (which also only works on Windows).
Things seem more complicated due to Visual Studio Code being cross-platform, and the fact that there's some extremely rudimentary support for consoles in Jetbrains tools, but there's no debugging support at all.
In the US, they were never fined for bundling IE with Windows and there was never a browser choice screen mandate.
And anyone can download an alternate browser and looking at Chrome’s market share, most do.
What would you prefer? That a browser doesn’t come with Windows and users going to an ftp site to download one like the 90s?
And to a first approximation, no one wants Linux on their desktop.
> In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS?
That’s not really a minor point. It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
Even for certain CAD software I use that has Mac and Windows versions, the Windows version feels so much more performant and responsive. I’ll switch to Windows for anything serious.
Also, YMMV, but in the past 5 or so years my Windows workstation has felt less buggy and more stable than my Macs. I’ve dealt with a lot of annoying quirks on the Mac over the years where the only solution is to wait for the next update and hope it’s fixed. Even today, accessing network file shares is incredibly buggy on Mac in certain cases.
I daily drive Linux for everything except games, and gaming on Linux has come far enough that I'll be switching over soon. My 60+ father also uses Linux for most of what he does.
And, yes, software working on your OS is not a minor point. That's the whole reason I used to go with the "best tool for the job" approach. Windows Recall is what changed that for me. I can't see using an OS with spyware built in as a "feature".
In my opinion, Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft, so...
> It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
So, the number of video editing, photo editing, CAD, gaming, and so on tools that work on Linux has grown a LOT. It's not just for basic stuff. You can do almost anything you need to on Desktop Linux. Yes, a lot of things are rough around the edges, but they're that way because people haven't invested in them, not because they're bad tools.
> But crucially, 365 plans don’t provide unlimited access to Copilot – that requires an extra $37/month subscription called Copilot Pro. Instead, the plans provide a bank of 60 credits per month, where each credit pays for one action that makes use of Copilot.
Wow I missed this part of the story. It’s incredibly shitty. The are basically making the whole world pay $5 a month for a _trial _ of Copilot ?
Office is so 20th century.
I have an even cheaper suggestion: doing like me, using org-mode for notes and small potatoes computation, Python for more complex stuff, rarely Maxima CAS, and LaTeX to produce documents. All these tools offer much bigger features set, much bigger flexibility, produce much better results and are FLOSS tools.
Seriously the MIT Missing Semester MUST be a high-schools mandatory course, anyone who want to have a non-mere-manual profession must have passed this course. We are in damn 2025, it's about time to recognize that computers are the mean of knowledge like papers and libraries before, not knowing how to use them properly means being illiterate, even with some PhDs.
This is gross, and should be illegal. Absolutely get in the bin with this nonsense.
Microsoft Partner Network. $500 a year includes five seats of Office 365 Enterprise and $100 a month in Azure credit. On top of Visual Studio Pro and a bunch of other perks.
Recommended strategy instead:
1. Change your credit card number so that you cannot be billed anymore
2. Use a free and open source alternative. They're good enough at this point
Otherwise you're just funding their grift.
What free and open source alternative works on my iPhone/ipad?
Don't know about opensource, but it's free for Desktop and has mobile versions - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onlyoffice-documents/id9448969...
Free isn’t the issue. Google’s office products are free, have mobile apps that work offline and while a desktop app isn’t a big deal for me, some who travel for work and use a laptop that may not have internet access all of the time - mostly on a plane - might care. WiFi is available on most planes and free with some airlines but is unreliable.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem, iWorks is free, has iOS and desktop versions for the Mac and a web version. But it’s the same argument for Windows users I had for GSuite.
The poster I replied to cares about open source I assume.