Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses Microsoft, burdened by growing demand for its cloud services and healthy revenue, said on Thursday that it will raise commercial prices for Microsoft 365 in six months. The price change, which does not apply to consumer or education products, represents the first significant increase in the decade since predecessor Office 365 …
This is always going to happen with software by subscription.
Except for a few geeks office has not changed in 15 years. (at least for most people)
We still use the same functions in Excel and the same stuff in Word)
Personally i have never used anything else in office except for outlook (2007).
Forgot, i used to use access many years ago.
Agreed. This has been a pain in the butt. I have had to use davmail to bring the Microsoft nonsense with actual standards.
I almost need a separate server for all these bridges these days. I already have around 3 connecting my IRC to various other clown services.
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"the many features Microsoft has added to Microsoft 365"... which were totally unasked for. And as for "real-time collaboration" in Word, that can f#ck right off. I've rolled back my version and stopped updates just to avoid the hell that it's created for me. (At least they've actually listened a bit to the tremendous backlash and finally included the ability to opt out while they sort out the mess they created. I'm still not trusting it yet though.)
Oh...I have had recent experience with "real time collaboration" on a large Word document. And it was NOT a pleasant experience.
Imagine, if you will, a client-hosted document, in a slightly older version of Word, being edited by geographically distributed members of our organization, all using, ideally, the same, slightly newer, version of Word...some locally installed, some O365.
Now, sprinkle on the vagaries of the global Internet, various folks' personal connections, and random noise.
If more than three or four people were trying to edit the document, it was bedlam. Changes were un-changed, hangs aplenty, refreshes took minutes...just loads of fun. After enough people gave up in frustration, it was possible to accomplish something, but then, people decided to try again, and as the user count increased, functionality decreased, until everything stopped. Lather, rinse, repeat...ad nauseum.
Didn't need to. MS were offering office back in the day for £20 if you could prove[1] you were in or part of the education system. Everyone else had to pay £250-300 or whatever.
[1] IIRC, it was quite a low bar. Almost anything with the name of the school or institution would do such as headed notepaper.
Who isn’t going to be using Outlook with Exchange Online? The closest viable competitor is eM Client at £45/licence/person. It does last forever though!
But then you have Microsoft Teams to unbundle too, which integrates with Word and SharePoint seamlessly, while also mostly eliminating the need for server hardware. LibreOffice is free but storage isn’t… and even if it was, you’re going to want to share files securely across the corporate boundary at some point.
Unless Microsoft are subjected to more antitrust scrutiny, they’ll be able to keep ratcheting prices up without a single viable replacement in sight. Even Google Workspace is failing to keep up with Redmond’s aggressively anti-competitive approach,
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No, but if I buy/lease a z/OS mainframe from IBM, I only pay for the cpus that are enabled, not the cpus that are installed in the box. The same goes for quite a few vendors, where its more cost effective for them to ship fully populated hardware (usually fully self-contained racks) than it is to schedule maintenance engineers, shipping, installation,testing, and customer qualification testing. It means installing a license to 'add 2 cpus' or 'add 20TB of disk' becomes a much less expensive (for the vendor) and much easier (for the customer) update.
You sure can! Even about 8 years ago Foundry/Brocade had a very annoying scheme where the SFP+ card was licensed per 4 ports. Always very annoying that.
I always liked the Juniper ’trust-based’ licensing model. You could used any unlicensed feature and it’d tell you that it needed a licence. It’d work just fine though. Excellent for quick changes where paperwork can catch up later.
And I've never ever missed any of these loads of features mentioned. I bought it back then for 14 quid, when my company got an employee discount as part of a license deal with MS. This shows that there's actual value in owning rather than renting software licenses.
MS should be careful when pushing these price increases to individuals, some of them may find that LibreOffice does everything they need...
Yes, I did. DId you?
Next, to test round-tripping, we saved the document as Open Document Text (.odt) and then resaved as .docx and opened it in Word. This was not so good: diagrams had gone wrong and were now broken up and overlaying the text, when reopened in Word.
A further experiment established that even without the intermediate step, just changing one character and saving the document corrupted it when opened in Word. Incidentally, this test also showed that using Microsoft Office support for Open Document formats is challenging: in our test, importing the .odt version to Word made the diagrams disappear completely.
Before you go any further I should tell you I use LibreOfice NOT MSOffice.
"Incidentally, this test also showed that using Microsoft Office support for Open Document formats is challenging: in our test, importing the .odt version to Word made the diagrams disappear completely.
I must admit, I have had similar problem when opening up old archived Word documents from maybe 10-15 years ago in current incarnations of Word. Sometimes, weird things happen, especially in more complex documents. Luckily I don't need to do that too often.
... that nobody I know asked for, and they don't mention the features I actually used, that they removed (only a few of these to be fair) and features they changed and didn't give a revert button... (the one I'm most angry about is forcing One Note tabs down the side in all versions)
Yeah, Microsoft... go to hell. In a handbasket. On a railway. At speed.
Spataro counts the features added but is uncharacteristically quiet on the number of features removed. Adding Teams while removing Skype is probably a net loss of features. It's certainly a loss of functionality, ease of use and convenience.
"Microsoft Teams now has a shortcut for raising your hand within meetings. To raise your hand, you can just press CTRL+SHIFT+K. Everyone in the meeting will see that you've got your hand up"
Are people really having video meetings and doing 3 finger keyboard salutes to "raise their hand", rather than perhaps actually hoisting that thing on the end of their arms in front of the camera? What's next? Yawn? Scratch Arse?
"Are people really having video meetings and doing 3 finger keyboard salutes to "raise their hand", rather than perhaps actually hoisting that thing on the end of their arms in front of the camera? What's next? Yawn? Scratch Arse?"
No. You can press the corresponding button as well.
Hand raising is pretty useless in small meetings. But when you're holding large meetings or e.g. giving a lecture, you would/could not watch every single webcam feed out there. Most people don't even use a webcam for several reasons. I'm often driving a car while on a meeting; or I just can't be bothered with showing my mug.
Perhaps you should think beyond your daily Skype chat with mommy.
"Are people really having video meetings and doing 3 finger keyboard salutes to "raise their hand", rather than perhaps actually hoisting that thing on the end of their arms in front of the camera? What's next? Yawn? Scratch Arse?"
It's aimed at the Emojii generation :-)
In my country everybody, including LibreOffice users and people who don't even own a computer, will end up paying some for this price raise, because our government is addict to MS Office. In 2012 president decreed that the use of free and open software should be the preferred option, the irony is that in the last 9 years government spending on MS licenses / subscriptions has skyrocketed. There has been a massive government migration to MS's Cloud. Its like you really need MS Word to make those ugly government documents. And the government is bankrupted Go figure!
"In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities"
Ah, yes. But how many new capabilities did the people ask for?
How many capabilities did you lose?
How many vulnerabilities did you introduce?
Only rhetorical questions, I suppose.
Too drunk to really care any more.
Stay safe and well, fellow commentards.
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