You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase
257 comments
·January 9, 2025gwerbret
aetherspawn
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.
baobun
> 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).
jazzyjackson
I’m on Team Airgap but I would expect that bringing on dedicated devops staff to maintain internal systems would blow away any cost savings and leave you at higher risk for downtime if the one Linux Wizard you hired to set it all up leaves for greener pastures. At least the SaaSs have a higher bus factor.
And then you have your security risks of duplicating your access control. So you mirror all your employees emails, now you have to make sure only administrators have read access and avoid ever exposing that system to the internet and prevent exfil.
I’m thinking of how to do this for a friends company and the amount of stuff that a SaaS takes care of is staggering. Right now I’m stuck on learning to be my own root CA to distribute client certificates for mTLS so I can avoid relying on third party SSO/auth.
ajb
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.
dijit
Out of interest, who's managing your mail, accounts, purchasing and computer setup now?
scarface_74
“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.
graemep
> 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.
null
esperent
> 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.
scarface_74
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?
formerphotoj
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!
junto
Softwarelizenzverschlimmbesserung
“Verschlimmbesserung” is a great German word that describes “an attempted improvement that actually makes things worse”.
croemer
Digitalisierungsschattenpreise
zx8080
> 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.
sam_lowry_
> 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.
graemep
> 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.
redserk
> 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.
raxxor
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.
arielcostas
You can also send out your emails via a relay, like Amazon SES, right? Host an email server (like opensmtd + Dovecot, or with Postfix+Dovecot), and forward external emails through SES.
Workaccount2
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.
salgernon
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.
gruez
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.
cj
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.
scarface_74
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.
1vuio0pswjnm7
"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."
Statement #1 will trigger a stream of HN replies that ignore statement #2 and attempt to justify the price increase from $0 in 2010 to whatever Microsoft is charging today. It is anyone's guess why this happens.
The old computer is the author's personal computer, not one owned by an employer with a "Professional/Enterprise" license. This is clear from the final sentence of the comment.
The author is not the only recreational user who still has an old computer with Office 2010 (I have some other past versions of Office as well) and is aware of the con.
zugi
> 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.
gruez
>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"
userbinator
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.
gruez
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).
null
hulitu
> You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite.
Is there any "patched" office suite up there ? Microsoft was never famous for its security and Google is of "ship it first, fix it later" and "extend the attack surface as much as possible" philosophy.
danpalmer
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.
gruez
>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.
danpalmer
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.
duxup
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.
ndriscoll
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.
duxup
For personal stuff I agree, I haven't found an office suite necessary.
int_19h
You can still buy Office 2024 as a proper app without any of that cloud stuff if you want to.
Mistletoe
And what if I want it as a program instead? :)
halfcat
You mean floppies, right? Yeah, like a stack of 26 floppies that you can own and use forever.
725686
Could you please point me where to buy it?
WarOnPrivacy
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...
bonestamp2
It's the item in the third column: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...
brewdad
It's available through Costco. I'm sure Amazon and other similar retailers have it as well. 2024 Version.
torton
Woot has licenses for sale every so often. About $30 for the 2021 version the last time I noticed.
dsukhin
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-...
int_19h
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.
kibibu
Does this have the crippled version of AutoSave that only works with OneDrive?
netsharc
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!".
Andrew6rant
Woah woah woah, unlimited saves for only $2/mo?
Clearly, we need an ad-supported $0.99/mo tier with a limit of 50,000 saves per quarter (additional saves $0.01 each).
$2.99/mo is what gives you unlimited* saves to disk.
* C:// drive only. External drives are limited to 10,000 saves per period)
Contact sales for enterprise pricing
carbocation
> For non-commercial use
What the hell
lolinder
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-...
bonestamp2
And it includes Outlook.
globular-toast
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
thebruce87m
Clippy AI: Hey, it looks like you’re writing a letter FOR WORK >:-(
climb_stealth
Thanks for linking it! Looks like it is just a license for a single machine. So that still hurts :/
monomial
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.
what-the-grump
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...
Spivak
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.
what-the-grump
I pay $89 for 15 months of Outlook for Families thing, which gives me onedrive, office and ad free outlook, credit monitoring and centrally managed anti-virus for a family of 6... You are not beating that in any other provider. Credit and dark web monitoring alone per person will cost that much per month.
graemep
> For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / product
How many of those do you use?
what-the-grump
Everything except loop, kaizala, and parts of viva... so 90%?
null
bonestamp2
> adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO
They now have a $10/mo plan where you pick any one application.
actuallyalys
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.
speedgoose
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.
rednafi
How’s that a surprise? Microsoft dangles npm, TypeScript, GitHub, and VSCode, and suddenly people develop collective amnesia about their past behavior.
BigJono
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.
gruez
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.
rednafi
Those two titles are funny as hell
nickelpro
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.
alvah
"Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago"
Of all the things that didn't happen, this didn't happen the most.
raincole
It absolutely happened. But people didn't move to open source solutions. They moved to Google docs.
Spivak
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.
nickelpro
Everyone uses Google Docs, everyone, even people who don't use Google Docs have some interaction with Google Docs.
You use Google docs.
alvah
I use Google Docs and Office, and I guarantee outside whichever bubble you and the OP live in, millions of "trivial personal users" around the world also use Office, therefore didn't "move to free alternatives".
petepete
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.
fencepost
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.
scarface_74
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
donatj
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.
scarface_74
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.
snakeyjake
I use Excel to run my life. I have PTO calculators, workout and nutrition spreadsheets, and tons of financial spreadsheets with predictions, records, what-ifs, etc. How much did I spend on prescription eyewear in 2007? I can tell you. I've been using Excel since either the late 80s or very very early 90s so it is very familiar to me.
I use Word to draft and submit board reports for two non-profit boards I am on. One, has followed the same format, except for typeface updates, since 1951. You can take the very first vice president's report from 70+ years ago, set mine next to it, and they look practically identical (except for the typeface). Using the Word template someone made 20-ish years ago is very handy. I assume that is when they eliminated the secretary's position whose job it was to type up the reports for all of the old men, which I am one of now. I fill it out, hit save, email a copy to the rest of the board, show up with two printed copies, and put one in the binder that has every monthly VP's report since July 1951 and use the second as a reference for when I give my verbal report. Easy peasy no cloud bullshit.
I am a volunteer watershed steward, a fire prevention educator, and a member of an amateur radio and an astrophotography club. I give presentations 1-4 times per year for all of those and all of them are done in powerpoint. Again, no cloud bullshit. My presentations are on my laptops and don't rely on hopping on someone's wifi or tethering to my phone in a cinderblock building with no service anyways.
Even onenote is fantastic but I think that's free. I'm using it right now to plan a trip with 8 other people. When in-country with no, or poor, cell service the local notebook will be synced and ready for reference. No cloud bullshit.
bubblethink
Nobody moved to free alternatives. All the normies pay for Office. The cheapskates pirate it. The whole world runs on Office.
donatj
I don't know any individual that pay for office. Google Docs is good enough for 90% of things and free.
LUmBULtERA
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.
null
bombcar
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.
bonestamp2
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).
silversmith
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.
cgio
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.
silversmith
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.
pbhjpbhj
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.
TiredOfLife
Where can I get the free 1TB cloud storage with versioning/delete protection?
datavirtue
Enjoy your featureless spam bucket.
gherkinnn
> 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.
orionblastar
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.
mickael-kerjean
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...
presentation
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.
cratermoon
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.
thisislife2
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
uselpa
LibreOffice is awful on macOS. Also, file compatibility with MS Office is still problematic. Onlyoffice is indeed a better choice.
gerdesj
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.
lolc
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.
fencepost
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.
cratermoon
> 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.
scarface_74
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
m463
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.
MonkeyClub
It works better than Microsoft's, that's the issue.
Office purposefully doesn't follow its own documents' standards, and renders with particular quirks, so that one gets the experience you report.
lallysingh
"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.
sexy_seedbox
Wait till you find out about Microsoft Dynamics 365 increasing their dataverse storage from US$9.95 to US$40 per GB/month!
raxxor
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.
oefrha
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.
Havoc
> 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
noisy_boy
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.
photon_rancher
Your estimate is late by almost 20 years - the first of that generation graduated high school ten years ago.
But the problem is that over those ten years google docs mostly feels like it’s been enshittified. Today’s office suites all suck I just want office 2007 or the google docs beta experience back - those were snappy and obvious how to use. Even basic stuff like linear regression in excel is terrible UX these days
And so mostly they don’t care to push it and if they do it’s not a material over modern office anyway.
noisy_boy
I'm not sure if ChromeOS was also as pervasive 20 years ago as it is now. With its prevalence, the only office suite most students know is Google docs.
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.