Microsoft 365's add-on avalanche is putting the squeeze on customers Microsoft's demands for extra cash from customers wishing to use Copilot for Microsoft 365 has highlighted a growing problem – the number of paid add-ons. The cloud and software biz is now the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of $2.89 trillion, just ahead of Apple with $2.82 trillion. Quarter after …
Analyst Michael Cherry added: "Microsoft and other cloud vendors promised the cloud would help reduce IT costs, not just in terms of on-premises hardware and software, but also in terms of IT headcount. It now seems that the cloud is the cause of significant new costs."
And therein lies the rub. In the good old days, Microsoft got its revenue stream with a new release of Windows (both server and client) every few years followed by a new release of Office. With the cloud, that made way for the subscription model.
But, if you provide a stable, unchanging platform that suits your customers, the revenue stream levels off, which doesn't suit your shareholders. Each new addition to M365 is simply the equivalent of an "upgrade" which makes your shareholders happy, sure, but what about the customer whose "simple to manage" estate is ever more complicated to manage, licence and afford?
It seems that MS has been reading the 'Oracle Book on how to screw customers with gobbledygook licensing deals'.
Very soon, those [cough][cough] optional things will be rolled into the base product. No more saying no to something that you don't use and never plan to use. Tough!
MS will start sending in their 'License Police' into customers very soon. They can't have the plebs screwing even $1.00 from the money that they OWE MS on a daily basis.
Just say NO to MS. Come on people, you can do it. You know it makes sense.
One day I hope companies this size will be ok with the fact they don’t NEED to grow every single year when their profits are already in the billions each year. It’ll never happen though as long as shareholders exist. The bubble will have to pop at some point though - even the biggest companies will hit a limit of how much they’re willing to pay M$ per user per month…
It's actually both, because asking the price may cause people to stop paying the price. Resentfully in some cases.
I'm like that. If I resent a $2 fee tacked on I'll cancel a sale or subscription. For a recent example, a web host that I've been with since 2004 for dedicated server hosting. The company changed hands, I tolerated a few petty rate increases, but this was insulting. They started charging payment processing fees for all payment methods, just for me to pay my monthly bills. "Enjoy my $3.03, I'm flipping the DNS elsewhere at the end of next month".
Honestly, it doesn't do anything for a normal user that Google can't do.
This is going to be an ongoing theme of the decade. As companies struggle to breakeven with BAU, they will find more and more ways to make everything an "extra".
Ryanair are the logical destination for this behaviour.
This is what happens when you start slashing to sign people up 10 years ago.
See also: Adobe.
Not sure why you got 3 negative votes before my positive one.
Google services are different and in some ways better, some ways not as good.
For my current needs, if I need to drop into a Word/Excel world, LibreOffice works splendidly. No license, no clouds, and rarely (if ever) any targeted malware.
"Your DATA is all theirs despite what they say. Google is EVIL."
BS. If you're a business, Google makes it clear that the data belongs to the user, and that has always been the case.
Aside from that GCP is one of the most secure cloud platforms.
It's a different story if you're a consumer using free services, but even here Google has stopped scraping customer data for profiling years ago.
And if you're the type who gets triggered when someone mentions Google, you might want to have a look at what Microsoft does with all its (consumer) users' data, including outlook.com which (unlike Google) does scrape email content.
"one of the most secure cloud platforms" ... got a reference or data to support that? The banking industry disagrees with you. Look at the number of banks running core banking services on GCP, compared to AWS or Azure. Plenty of data out there.
The business model reveals all. If you aren't being charged for a service you are consuming, YOU are the product.
With some of these "Premium" things - Teams, SharePoint, etc it's hard to work out functionally is premium at all - corporate branding for teams for example - should be standard? Then there's the standard big bundles - a mishmash of stuff you wanted, and stuff you never did - Power BI or MS Access (really!) for every staff member
Co-pilot I can see as a cost due to the CPU/GPU/NPU running costs - but the model of per user for a large org is just too expensive - needs a Power BI Premium style shared capacity licence?
Really need a customisable bundle option - add in the discounts based on simple basis of buying more...
Oh - and if you need something, then you HAVE to buy it for a year not just the months you use it!
Licencing people - Golgafrincham B Ark anyone
What is see usually: a new "feature" is proposed for free for around 1 year, then is included in the "premium" version once the users got used to have it, and for some have built business process using it.
Of course, this new "feature" is automatically enabled on all tenants, without the customer's IT being allowed to disable it...
"Microsoft and other cloud vendors promised the cloud would help reduce IT costs, not just in terms of on-premises hardware and software, but also in terms of IT headcount. It now seems that the cloud is the cause of significant new costs."
If I remember correctly, this particular scenario is called "lying"
noun: the telling of lies, or false statements; untruthfulness
adjective: telling or containing lies; deliberately untruthful; deceitful; false
...and then bundling them into groupings so very carefully designed that you never get all the ones you want from a single bundle despite their "big data" showing them exactly what the most popular add-on are and creating a "base bundle" with all of those in it. It's ALWAYS about maximising profit, NEVER about providing what the customer wants. It very close to, if not actually, a monopoly, so they have the customer over a barrel. Successful business, at least for a while, was about having a better product or a better price. Now it's all about lock-in.
"customers wishing to use Copilot for Microsoft 365"
They exist?
But yes, the proliferation of extra-cost add-on licenses is getting expensive. It's unfortunately a classic case of what happens when one company controls too much of a particular market (in this case, the general-purposes office SaaS market).
I'm sorry (actually, I'm not!) but I can't feel any sympathy for businesses who first bought into what is the most unreliable, insecure and expensive (not just upfront, even more in TCO) software ecosystem there is, and after enduring all the crap that Microsoft chucks towards its customers on a semi-regular basis for years they still happily follow it into the cloud.
And now that Microsoft has them over the barrel, they are surprised that the ransoms becoming increasingly extortionate. Which those business customers might complain about but will still pay nevertheless, showing their business leaders as the tools they are.
Go Microsoft! No sympathy!
From a home PoV, it’s still relatively affordable.
6 User Family - inc 1Tb One Drive per user and full fat local apps (PC or Mac) and Mobile if you want - is still only £67 for a full year retail key on Amazon.
If you don’t like that, single user full software copies of Office 21 for £10-20 an Amazon and other download key led retailers.
May have changed now but when a sales bod was trying to flog us Copilot it was £30 per user min of 300 seats. So we'd have had to buy 250 more seats than the users we have.
I've predicted it will be given to management to make their life easier for the same pay and fuck everyone else below them still having to do all the manual working outs in Excel and still having to actually read reports.
Too many people are relying on it summerising reports meaning I predict here, on the register, that this will create more instances of Horizon. There will be some key data in those reports that the AI will ignore and so will the manager who just asked Copilot to summarise it for them because they are too fucking lazy to read it. More people will be falsely imprisoned because of a lazy manager. Much like we're seeing in the enquiry now, with managers in charge of a technical team and making no decisions themselves. Instead "I relied on the info John gave me. I'm not technical. I just manage the team".
LLM is just a reporting summary of shit found out there. Very little intelligence seemingly observed.
Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant have not benefitted … as they are still dumb as shit.
Yesterday.
Me: “Alexa resume”
Alexa: “Resume is not an option for that stream”
Me: “Sigh. Alexa continue”
Alexa: “**Resuming** Amazon Music”
Me: “Sigh”.
You can have as few seats as you like now, also with Office E3 &E5 not just Microsoft E3 & E5.
I've been trialling copilot.
The Teams recap is sort of OK if you've missed start of a meeting etc.
Outlook needs the new Outlook client which is horrible and doesn't really work properly for recapping lengthy mail trails.
I always find something it missed.
Writing an e-mail with Copilot is umm, not so good.
My normal style is somewhat terse, it insists on adding fluff like 'I hope this e-mail finds you well', and 'Thank you for your time and consideration'.
Anyone receiving that garbage would definitely know I didn't write it.
May have changed now but when a sales bod was trying to flog us Copilot it was £30 per user min of 300 seats
We had our MS accoount manager push us to trial copilot too (Clearly it's been added to all their sales targets). We told them where to go if they expected us to spend £100k on a trial for a few members for staff for a vasty over hyped technology.
But the 300 minimum purchase quantity was revoked the other day. I suspect because a lot of customers were telling MS where to go with their 300 user minimum quantity.
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This "extra 2% for looking in the mirror twice" reminded me of the "Master of the House" song from Les Miserables. :)
But it's useless if you have SaaS products (which many of us do) which use plugins for Excel / Outlook / Word. And if you use the M365 cloudy services. And if you want to be able to manage it tightly using Intune.
Fine for home users and some small businesses, but for larger organisations it is often not going to be a practical option.
Plus the user training issues, of course.
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