M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired' Readers have flooded our mailboxes with reports that Microsoft 365 Family licensing has fallen over this morning, so those of you who provide tech support to relatives or those using the office suite for a small business, consider yourself warned. Microsoft's Service Health page says a "licensing issue" is causing users with …
I upvoted you, but let's remember that locally installed software can fail too, and not all users are well-equipped to diagnose and repair the fault when that happens.
Nothing is perfect. Whether you run software locally or in the cloud, you're going to see occasional failures.
For most of the people affected they are not actually going to be in the position to do the much troubleshooting/fixing
They are consumers, not technical users so are reliant on the plethora of shite that a Google search returns,
"Oh I had that problem to an fixed it" - nobody actually says what the fix it
"Uninstall and reinstall"
"Reboot"
"Reinstall Windows"
Directories where I'm doing work are synced to NextCloud which not only has a backup of the last version but the version before that and before that.... Which has been handy from time to time.
Actually I don't keep local systems up 100% of the time. Laptops are switched off when not in use ant not even NextCloud is up all the time, thanks to the local electricity supply. It helps that updates aren't a monthly source of angst. They Just Work. The doffing of your hat is only occasioned by making sensible choices in the first place and those choices are also open to you.
It matters not whether we can keep our own systems up without ever failing but whether we can repair them when they do fail.
How do you propose to repair Microsoft's servers during this outage? Restart? Reboot? Reinstall? Do you have the same access to their data centre that you have to your machine on your desk?
MS Office is mine. It cannot be taken easily. You can rent everything; car, home, furniture, computers, software. But should your income stop for a while you lose everything. Should globalism breakdown you might find MS365 & your data vanishes. Rely on what you can't control and someone owns you. Sure cloud is great, as long as you know it can be gone in an instance. It's also been used to control free speech, oh dear you've broken our vague terms and gone against our fake liberalism. That's not right.
"MS Office is mine. "
You read the EULA that applies and you had to consent to?
Let me offer you a TLDR for the Microsoft Office EULA:
1) MS retain all rights and have no obligations.
2) You have obligations and no rights.
3) Microsoft may vary this agreement as and when they please without your agreement.
SONY tried that crap with gamers about a year ago. Games players that bought games that were suddenly pulled. I think a class action lawsuit threat forced SONY to refund those affected.
I'm an old engineer now, but man I miss the days when all my software ran locally. And I OWNED my music on records.
I stand corrected in law. Can they turn it off remotely? I was thinking of extreme situations where for example intercontinental Internet links are severed or USA descends into civil war, god forbid Europe picks a fight with Poootin or even our glorious leaders sever all ties with the US because Trump is Hitler ... or other such ego clashes and BS.
"Local" software does not toggle up and down at its own will. It either works, or it doesn't, in which case you don't use it at all!
Unless of course a system update breaks something it relies on, or you use a new feature you've not used before only to find it doesn't work. Or it's got one of those subtle bugs that corrupts your saved data in a really small way, not so you'll notice now, but in 3 months time when whatever project suddenly doesn't open, or there's filesystem corruption that causes something to stop working. or... or...
Hell it might even be something as subtle as it doen't handle DST and you open it at just the wrong time.
Software is complex, it doesn't just work or not work most of the time, it's way more subtle than that.
Maybe raise your expectations?
Maybe use more complex software. ;)
The applications suite represented by M365 is mature. I've been using office software of one form or another for 45 years and I've never experienced the catastrophic failure that this bug represents -- the code has always worked and while you could probably find a some corner that had a bug you really had to work at it.
The problem is entirely due to making the code rental rather than purchased outright. In order to keep users on the upgrade treadmill you have to continually churn features and change file formats (plus the obligatory dark hints about hackers etc.). Once on the treadmill you introduce rental licensing. This adds a lot of points of potential failure to what was once stable code (you're effectively paying for a procession of bug fixes and new bugs -- "it all makes work for the working person to do.....").
Perhaps "mature" in the "senile" sense. A 10-year-old copy of LibreOffice is more stable and usable than M365 - and without the half-a-dozen rewrites of the interface that makes everybody have to relearn it. Again.
But agreed on the making code a rental. Nope. If I'm going to pay for software, I'm going to BUY it, not rent it. I'm not a cow to be routinely milked - and I definitely am not going to rely on a license server somewhere for my daily usage.
> Locally installed versions of office apps are also failing due to license error.
We got a .DOCX in email. Opens for me Win7, no open for her Win11. This is a locally-installed bulk license Office 2003. After beating Thunderbird into telling what it was trying to start to open a .DOCX, I realized the internal parts of MS Office have too many names for Win11 to digest. I forced the OPEN box to believe "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE" and everybody happy.
"I don't know why individuals participate in this subscription nonsense, oh yeah; "you will own nothing and be happy"."
Compatibility for less tech-minded users, that's why. I can and would manage with Libre Office (already installed on the household's ex-Chromebook now running Mint), but my partner wouldn't cope with the unfamiliarity from her work usage of O365, and whilst I MIGHT get past that, a more pressing concern is a daughter who's at university, studying a serious subject, and needs 100% compatibility with other course members and the university. Since I'm maintaining a three PCs and a laptop, a family subscription to O365 makes a whole lot of sense, per user it's good value (not as good as LO, accepted) and the document sharing and limited "backup" options provide some resilience that would otherwise need more effort on everybody's part.
As soon as I can, I will jettison O365, but at the moment there's solid reasons for paying for it (and "paying for it" includes Microsoft's unwanted telemetry, privacy invasions, attempts to shove their awful "AI" down my throat, and randomly changing my chosen settings when they make changes to the OS).
The more sensible option would be to purchase one of the stand alone versions of Office which can be installed locally on the machine. Mostly I run Libre Office but I have Office 2010 installed on my machine just for those customers who need the full .docx compatability.
I bought a number of Office 2010 licenses a few years ago (home & student) when they were 3 licenses for £79.99. I believe that I still have 2 licenses left. This, however, won't matter in 20 months time when I retire.
There are still stand-alone licenses available from some resellers if you hunt round the internet and a well known auction site.
Compatibility for less tech-minded users, that's why
Same situation here. But you're presumably not aware that the £25 perpetual licence keys that you can get at Amazon actually "work" (cough, cough). All the way up to at least 2019.
But, having said that, I've had problems in the past with LO Calc spreadsheet compatibility (date representation/formats/etc), and with writing large (40+ page) manuals with Writer, and I don't have the bandwidth to check all this out with new releases, so it's the licence key for now.
I get that. My 'better?' half can't be bothered to learn something different and had a hissy fit when I tried to get her to use Libreoffice. You can get locally installed Office pretty cheap now if you look around. I worried it wasn't legal at first but the vendors I used all seemed ok in so much as the licence codes validated fine.
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Having a local install doesn't help - if Microshaft decides that you HAVE TO install an update and reboot BEFORE you can do anything else on your system.
For no apparent reason, my Outlook 2021 suddenly refused to send mail nor search...
Having a delayed brainfart, I peeked at the settings and discovered that there was an update pending for Windows.
As soon as I updated, everything started working again. Surprise, surprise. Not.
That's why I hate companies like Microsoft. They're not really a product company they're more of a tax or extortion business. All the time increasing control and now constant pushing to subscription/tax products. They can't take it with a gun so they manouver to remove choice. You will own nothing! It's like buying shares on modern platforms, most people don't realise you don't own them, you own the benefit and if the trading company has a problem their banks can take the lot. Same with money in bank accounts, in the right situation the bank can just take it legally. I bet the FSCS would not pay everyone in a major economic shock or there'd be some weasel way out such as paying out billions then devaluing the currency. There has been a slow erosion of property rights in almost every area of life. Which is why I am a tin hatter and want small government. Some consider me right wing but in reality I am a liberal and want as much freedom as possible for everyone. I don't want to control the minutia of everyone's life but our government does. An Englishman's home is his castle or should be!
I recommend not paying $104 per year just to be able to use a word processor when there are perfectly good word processors available for free that can be downloaded and installed in a few minutes. Hell, you could even do this as a backup in case the one you insist on paying for isn't available for a few hours due to the latest Microsoft fuck up.
Office applications were feature complete decades ago for all but the most specialize cases. Running them in the cloud when local compute is so cheap these days is a sales fest only rivaled by selling ice to Eskimos.
Cheers to the folks making that a revenue generator. And cheers to me for not keeping my work hostage to them.
"convince customers"
Spend too much time trying to convince them to work differently, and watch them become former customers :( It's a bit annoying really, but some people like to pay for things that are freely available, just so they can easily blame someone else when the computer eats their homework/whatever.
Not needing to blame someone is better than having someone to blame. As soon as some remote server enters into the mix there's a whole extra universe of things that can do wrong and give rise for reason to blame. Is taking a one-off effort to learn something new better than having frequent failures to work at all?
And how often does the commercial version require new ways that have to be learned? Genuine question since the last version of Office I used was not noticeably different to Libre Office - at least I moved from one to the other with no sense of effort. The big issues I did find with use of previous versions of Office was that being given a file from a slightly newer version would be unopenable by the older.
I use it every day because I have to through my corporate account. And based on that experience, you are not missing anything.
1. Zoom or WebEX both work better than Teams
2. Any email client capable of downloading attachments works better than the "new" outlook
3. LibreOffice works better than the rest of Office 357
Oh no, not New Outlook. My client was using Office Outlook with 3 mailboxes but then New Outlook imposed itself on her computer. Also she could say was that her email was acting weirdly and she'd lost two of her email accounts.
To get it back to Office Outlook was simply a case of switching the switch in New Outlook to OFF. It took me a while to figure out that was all I needed to do.
People who use computers for business are not interested in new feature and ignore them. This is why Microsoft have to force new features onto people and force them to use them. People only notice the new features if something is broken by them or they can't work the software in the way they have got used to.
Does anyone know what CoPilot does apart from slowing down weak computers? I've not met any clients who use it. Some have asked me what it is. I tell them it's a virus and I'll remove it.
No worries. My parents use Ubuntu. My relatives that run Windows are on their own. I advise to run a better OS and would install and set it for them. I mean nobody with a mechanic relative would buy a Yugo or (insert infamously unreliable car of your choice here) then insist their mechanic relative keeps it going. Then when advised with some more reliable cars to get next time, when the time comes buys ANOTHER Yugo and expects support. This is EXACTLY the same as far as I am concerned.
And ones that run macOS don't need help (... both because macOS doesn't blow up like Windows, and because they are the type of user that barely uses their computer and using their ipads, iphone, apple tv, etrc, for video, calls, and text. I've never even seen them fire up a web browser.)
I run Ubuntu and Windows, I prefer Ubuntu. It may be more reliable but there's a lot of convenience in Windows from the better software support. Installing a new piece of software on Ubuntu is often painful and requires much Googling (not really Google don't like them) sorting libraries, configs and security because it changes so fast, there are so many Linux flavours and the developers can't keep up.
If you keep to software in the repositories of the relevant Linux distribution, then you really don't have to worry about installing them. Just use the package manager, and provided you're pointed at the correct repo, there should be no dependency issues.
For software that is not in a repo. Try looking for a flatpak or an appimage, or if using Ubuntu, a Snap. These should be self contained, and although they may be heaver on resources to run, they should just work, again without dependency issues.
If you are actually using a tarball or installing from source, then you're probably not that worried about doing a bit of googling!
I mean nobody with a mechanic relative would buy a Yugo or (insert infamously unreliable car of your choice here) then insist their mechanic relative keeps it going.
I heard from an auto mechanic friend that she has relative who did that very thing (though it wasn't a Yugo, it was a Ford F-150 hybrid pickup truck). Said relly is pissed the mechanic refused to fix it after the third breakdown.
in the article, and stating UTC. I can am/pm, but the logic behind is an off-by-one error at 12 am/pm, always needing to double check. Same as the MM/dd/yyyy logic... Long live iso8601!
Oh, and of course, bashing on MS for their 90% cloud reliability. If MS-cloud-DRM would be 99.999% reliable (i.e. ~53 minutes of fail each year), and falling back to "run 30 days on if license wrong" to catch the last 0.001%, nobody would have an issue. But unreliability is what MS-cloud is.
If customer nations decide to add tariffs to services (such as cloud services), in retaliation to US tariffs on goods, then the Whitehouse might decide to disable those services. And then turn them back on. Whenever they choose.
Do as we say, or we'll disable your business/government.
Now sing along:
You put the tariffs ON.
You take the tariffs OFF.
You put the tariffs ON.
And then you play a round of golf.
You do the Hokey Pokey, and you turn around . . . .
It's not about uptime or who has the most failures. It's about control and ownership. Own it and it's hard to take it away without a law or a gun. Rent it and it belongs to someone else and their whim. I'll be interested to see if we are stupid enough to get in a real world war what keeps working, I'm assuming conventional because if nukes, we wont care if 365 works. Interesting name 365 - does that mean it must at least work a bit everyday?
If I were Putin the first thing I'd do is start destroying Western economy, although we're doing a good job ourselves, and the ability to coordinate. We saw what happens to supply chains in Covid but that is nothing to what happens during world wars. How will cloud work without comms links? No one has really tested that. Even systems entirely deployed in region, we only have the vendors assurance that regions are fully autonomous and they wouldn't lie right ...
If I ran my own business I would not deploy to cloud in a way that could not be recovered to another cloud or on premises in a day or two. But 100% I would use cloud.
"If I were Putin the first thing I'd do is start destroying Western economy, although we're doing a good job ourselves"
I think Putin's Agent Orange is doing the job for us. The only remarkable thing here is that STILL the people who voted for him won't see that they've elected a traitor who's in thrall to Russia, and is systematically dismantling all the checks and balances on presidential power that the US spent about 240 years developing.
365 account always asking to upgrade to 365 subscription zzzzz yes done that family of 4.
Blocks kids browsing as they use class charts for school so again constantly nagging to log in for "their safety."
Thought clearing the accounts and fresh account install would work.
Hell no. Wife's account was over the storage limit without 365 subscription so then had to wait for 30 mins whilst deleting over 64000 emails ( she's very busy) just to re enter into the family account. Evening wasted.
To top it off it didn't work and the kids still get nag popup to login into their m$ email account. (Which they do to no avail.)
Horrible buggy subscription service - I understand why the boss still uses the last office suite before the subscription model on an isolated PC.
is your friend.
Besides, it is free, it works, and does what around 95% of users require.
I still don't understand why people pay subscriptions for something when they can have the same functionality for free.
Too many people still have the mindset, that you can only get value for money.
And finally, with this constant online non-sense MS actually break the law in some jurisdictions (GDPR)
I get it that many users are not tech-savvy, and had a locally run copy of a word processing program fallen over, they'd be just as far up faeces creek without a propulsion device. However, those who ARE capable are not happy.
Solution? Use a local copy. Better still, use a free local copy. I switched to Libreoffice nearly a year ago. There was a period or adjusting to 'ways' that differed. I still have to save the odd document for those who can't manage to open a non-Micro$oft document. I find it odd that a file format based on an open format cannot be opened by an application produced by a mega-corporation that boasts that they use an open file format... One might almost think it was a deliberate attempt to hurt those who desert them.
I also abandoned Windows. I had been part of the Windows Insider Programme and I saw plenty of stuff looming that was, er, not liked. So I jumped ship around 2 years ago.
Never looked back.
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