Microsoft 365, Office 365 price hikes delayed

Customers staring down the barrel of Microsoft's price increases for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites from the start of this month have been given a reprieve but only until 15 March. The hikes were confirmed last August by corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro and were due to be introduced from the start of this …

[Flocke Kroes]

Sparato must be very thankful for libre office

Spataro tried to justify the price hikes by pointing to the extra features customers had been lavished with.

By itself, bundling unwanted software is not illegal but when a monopoly does forces purchases of unwanted goods with their unique product the EU will fine them many millions a decade later.

[gobaskof]

Re: Sparato must be very thankful for libre office

"many millions a decade later" can be factored into the cost benefit analysis of exploiting a monopoly. If you protect your monopoly and use it to expand into different domains you can make many many billion a year. Being fined many millions a decade later is a small price to pay. Unless regulators grow some teeth these monopolistic shenanigans will continue.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Sparato must be very thankful for libre office

See also this recent LTT video about the evils of Edge.

[Dwarf]

Because bean counters always want year on year growth, it doesn't matter to them if they caused the world to end or the universe to explode - so long as the number is bigger this year than it was last year -- pure greed.

[Anonymous Coward]

bean counters always want year on year growth

I've seen it happen - company owned by a corporate I worked for had a near-monopoly in the US (96% market share) so was obviously returning strong profits but because they weren't growing 10% a year the corporate bean counters wanted to sell them off.

[Youngone]

One of the question I ask at any job interview is "What is the boss' background"?

If the answer is Finance or Accounting I end things right there. I have been bitten a couple of times.

[AMBxx]

Yammer

Honest questions:

1) Who on here uses Yammer?

2) Who on here knows wtf Yammer is?

[fidodogbreath]

Re: Yammer

Apparently it's not the same as Sweet-Potato-er.

[Cederic]

Re: Yammer

I used Yammer when it was first new. I think it predates Slack, certainly Teams. It's weird that it still exists separately to Teams, rather than being consolidated.

It went wrong from the outset: Good features for the users, no support at all to a corporation trying to prevent information loss, leakage of customer data, etc. So the corporate response was a very reasonable risk adverse one of 'Banned.'

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Yammer

Yep. The company I was working at the time, tried it back in around 2011 and dropped it like a lump of smelly dog poo. We put Wireshark on the network and saw all the data slurping it was doing so we passed despite management wanting us to use it. It died a natural death and not one person with a techie background missed it.

I think this was about the time that MS bought it. Strange that...?

[HildyJ]

Re: Yammer

You can't blame MS for Yammer in 2011. They didn't buy it until 2013.

[Youngone]

Re: Yammer

I have a Yammer license at work, and I get emails about Yammer groups I am a member of (apparently) but I have no idea what use it could possibly be.

My boss pays $11 per month for the license (I think) which seems mental, but I don't care because it is just one huge voracious corporation passing money to another.

[Pirate Dave]

Turning those screws

I spent 20 years in Academics, just went back to manufacturing 3 years ago. Microsoft practically gives their software away to colleges/universities. But holy shit, they beat corporate customers like a rented mule. I got a quote from CDW a couple of days ago for a Windows Server license to possibly upgrade an older (but still usable) Dell Poweredge, and it's around $1100 for Windows Server Standard. Damn, it's hard to justify that much $ for a box that old. I guess I'll have to try to help the boss get over his Linux phobia. That, or we just keep running Server 2012 on it until the power supply lets out all of its magic smoke.

[Korev]

Re: Turning those screws

Linux support (if you need it) is surprisingly expensive too

[Pirate Dave]

Re: Turning those screws

Nah, as long as "yum update" does something useful, that's all the "support" I need on the Linux side.

[Kimiko]

Same issue as I have with Autodesk currently.

As a micro entity business I only need to use the primary products. Stop treating every customer as if they are billion dollar corporations with infinite resources.

I might even consider minor increases in costs as reasonable, IF I felt the money was being spent to improve the product. Rather than to buy out and shut down it's competitors whose software DID actually work effectively, and which I might have been relying on to earn money to pay bills. *Cough Wunderlist cough*

Planner and Todo are beyond useless, in spite of their potential to integrate with Outlook and Teams.

What I do need is software that... does what it says on the tin, that integrates with other suite products, and which enables easy collaborative working with businesses on external domains. We can't all just assimilate every business into our own network.

I don't have an IT department to troubleshoot and find workarounds for the shortcomings of my software.

I don't need unnecessary new features and continuous UI updates.

Just give me fixes for issues that have long been identified in posts on feedback sites and received 1000's of votes, but that have blatantly been ignored for multiple years.

[fidodogbreath]

Same issue as I have with Autodesk currently.

And Adobe.