Office 365 prices 'to rise by up to 13 per cent' Microsoft looks to have increased the price it will charge for Office 365 in the Euro-zone, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Canada. Nicole Sheridan, who works and blogs for Irish distributor MicroWarehouse, has posted a Microsoft missive on the price rises. She also quotes from a Microsoft communiqué that says the …
Microsoft is adding significant value to our products
Translation: It starts to work, just about.
Frankly Exchange Online's web-based admin interface is a crippling disaster (So are the basic concepts of that Exchange thing, frankly; users not identified by a UUID but by an arbitrary e-mail address? Please!! Renaming users yields mysterious error messages? I need PowerShell to debug and fix it? Whatever!) and Azure is a fat blob hurtling far being AWS on a mall scooter, yelling that it will FUCK IT UP!! Note that I have only used the classical interface, I haven't even dared touch the metronized one.
There is a loooong way to go still.
“we baked more in so you should pay more”
Well, at least it's more honest than the usual "you paid more to Intel for a more cor-y CPU so you should give us more for an unchanged product running on that same CPU" argument. It's just extortion, but then again they need the money to fuel their write-offs.
I hate to make this a U.S.of.A-centric thing but the Republicans are perfecting various means of taking a pretty bad position and crapping all over it to sell it to their customers.
They (MS) seem to be engaged in the same behavior. Take a few customer-facing products (Excel, Word, even Explorer) and hobble them over the years with more crap. Ribbons? We got ribbons!
Since they are late to the internet, I can see a few stumbles which they've demonstrated well. However, forcing customers into a MS view of their internet is probably not going to work. Charging more for the inconvenience will probably not work. Convincing the Executive Suite that this is The Way will probably work, as always.
Personally, I welcome my penguin comrades.
"In these cloudy times, if Redmond adds some extra goodies, they're just part of the product and opting out looks nigh-on impossible."
Well, quite - and that applies to anyone providing cloudy-goodness (FSVO 'goodness'), not just Microsoft. It's one of the reasons I dislike cloud solutions - and I would imagine many other El Reg readers feel the same. The problem is, some people just will not be told.
As AC says above "Those who will not open their eyes will soon be opening their purses" - never heard that saying before, but it's one worth remembering (and AC's post has therefore been duly upvoted)
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