Amazon to drop a cool $1B on Microsoft 365 cloud suite Amazon has reportedly taken out more than a million licenses for Microsoft's 365 productivity suite. Microsoft is set to welcome Amazon as a big spender on its software in a deal believed to be worth more than $1 billion over five years, according to Insider, which claims to have seen documented proof and cites an unnamed …
I'm very skeptical that Amazon actually needs squillions of copies of MS Office. Yeah, there might be a few people who have foolishly locked themselves into their own many-tentacled multi-dimensional eldritch horror custom Excel spreadsheets, but, given that Amazon is a network computing company with a bazaar attached, you would have thought that LibreOffice would be more than good enough for the vast majority of them, or that they could certainly offer enough development bonuses to make it so, for much much less cost than they are just wastefully pouring into the Sarlacc's maw…
Well, as I've noticed / said before, LO isn't as compatible with MS as they would like you to believe. A recent download of a .DOCX file from LinkedIn wouldn't open on the most updated install of LO no matter how much I tried; I ended up opening it up inside Live.com web's Office support. Only to have to download the very same document in .PDF format in order to print! o_O
So, if you really want or need to guarantee proper Office support...you must, sadly, commit to Orifice (that was not misspelt).
Well, 'tis the season for raising strawmen.
But .docx does not comply with its own "OOXML" spec, and Microsoft can tweak that noncompliance at will. They could even wilfully bork (i mean, upgrade to the latest non-spec) documents uploaded to linkedin so that they don't work even if the original would have done.
It's not Libreoffice's fault if MS keep moving the goalposts.
Anyway, who accepts .DOCX files from linkedin? PDF your CVs, please.
Or if it must for some reason be editable, perhaps use a truly open spec such as ODT, which MS Word supposedly supports. And if it doesn't work properly then, who do you blame? Libreoffice again probably
I'll be happy to give you one of my very, very rare downvotes.
I'm NOT blaming LO. Just don't claim "compatible with the most recent Office .DOCX" if you can't 100% prove that it is, that's all.
The POINT of my discussion, which is why you deserved that downvote x10, is that if you NEED 100% .DOCX compatibility then you must go MS. That's still true, no matter how much you want to spin yourself into your alternate reality. You can't go LO, or OO, or anything else for that matter, because then you can't guarantee 100% compatibility. My answer was regarding "Why not LO?", and that's the solid, predictable, discernible and bankable reason why a corporation will buy 1mil licenses for Office. If MS "tweaks" an MS-originated format, well, I guess they can do that, too. Still circles back to the same answer: "We need 100% compatibility, so we're [stuck] going with Office".
> "We need 100% compatibility, so we're [stuck] going with Office".
At that point, they've got you by the goolies. They could increase the price or poison their terms (don't want your documents being used as input for GPT-n++? Tough shit) and you'd be [stuck] with that.
That is why they got antitrust suits lobbed at them left right and centre, but they don't seem to give a shit, because business execs think that anything other than the MS koolaid is a risk.
We need 100% compatibility with Microsoft. Which vendor shall we choose? It's a somewhat circular argument isn't it?
We need 100% compatibility with Oracle.. Which vendor shal.. Aargh
How on earth would scamazon spy on its employees without the data-slurping power of the Microsoft 345 admin portal? All the Teams integrations, interaction analyses, call transcripts and emoji-histograms of all their dronesfleshy money-sinks
Joke icon: the joke is that people seem to put up with this shit
They will get the full Busibess M365 experience - so yes office, but also Teams, Sharepoint and 1xTb of OneDrive and mobility apps.
Yea for a fraction of $1bn they could knock up Amazon Prime Office … but it’s about reciprocal back scratching- hence the relaxation of AWS licensing screws. You’d think Amazon has an extensive internal IT Ecosystem already though.
It’s almost collusion/cartel behaviour?
Because they are a major enterprise? Libre Office might cut it for home users but you are having a laugh if you think it is enterprise grade. The possible alternative is Borg Office, but why would you when Google's product is vastly inferior and doesn't offer anything like the integration into all the Microsoft stuff they will be using anyway.
If Amazon's problem were really having a functional office suite, then they'd develop and maintain it in-house for far less than $200m per year. This is what they do with everything else, to the point of forking open-source software and maintaining it themselves, for licensing or other reasons.
No, I suspect this is really just quid-pro-quo: it's what Amazon had to do to get favourable licensing deals to run Microsoft products on AWS, and hence make AWS more attractive to its customers than competitors (and as attractive as Azure). In other words, the two are stitching up the market between themselves.
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