back to article 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 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Childcatcher

    You get what you pay for ...

    ... death by a thousand cuts.

    The cloud will not be kind to you (unless you are a MS/Goog int al share holder).

    1. Adelio

      Re: You get what you pay for ...

      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.

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: You get what you pay for ...

        and I just got done reading THIS El Reg article...

        1. Tom Chiverton 1

          Re: You get what you pay for ...

          Which is why MS are so keen to disable things like IMAP by default, so non-Outlook users become a pain point and some fraction will be forced to switch back Lookout

          1. karlkarl Silver badge

            Re: You get what you pay for ...

            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.

      2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Re: Except for a few geeks office has not changed in 15 years

        Oh, sure. The Ribbon has gone completely unnoticed by non-geeks.

        Right.

  2. redpawn

    Paying more makes you

    realize the underlying value. Paying more still would be rapture. Sorry but you'll have to wait six months for that.

  3. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge

    As the great scholar said...

    Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum!

    1. Mike 137 Silver badge

      Re: As the great scholar said...

      "Cuius testiculos habes..."

      Sic friat crustulum

      1. John H Woods Silver badge

        Re: As the great scholar said...

        friatur?. Or does it crumble something else?

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Mike 137 Silver badge

          Re: As the great scholar said...

          Comminuit?

  4. Pangasinan Philippines

    What version of Office gets Visio?

    I'm just a pleb.

    1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

      Visio is a bolt-on to your Office 365 subscription.

    2. Jed T

      There isn't one.

  5. dboyes

    Remind me again why we chose PCs over timesharing?

    Sounds like someone read a bunch of back issues of Datamation and figured out how profitable timesharing could be.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: Remind me again why we chose PCs over timesharing?

      it's all because the Redmond Marketeers could sell ice water to indigenous people of the Arctic...

      (on a subscription basis)

  6. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

    "reflects the increased value we have delivered to our customers over the past 10 years."

    They owe me quite a bit of money then.

    1. Hubert Cumberdale

      "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.)

      1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
        Mushroom

        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.

        1. Hubert Cumberdale

          There's a lot to be said for linear editing.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ha ha ha. Funny. Didn't we predict exactly this 9-10 years ago when MS started really pushing their online service stuff? First hit's free (Live@EDU), and it gets worse from there. Start torquing those screws, man, we're barely screaming right now.

    1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

      On education pricing, the first hit (A1) is still free.

      (And if you read the article, education pricing isn't increasing. Yet)

    2. Col_Panek

      Get the teachers locked in to MS, and they require the kids to use it. Because it's "the standard".

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        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.

    3. martyn.hare

      Unbundling it all is near impossible now though

      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,

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    Never heard of any of those exiting new features. Can I pay less if I don't want them?

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Can I pay less if I don't want them?

      it doesn't work with cable TV, why would it work with Micros~1???

      (I never watch at least 1/3 of the cable channels, and barely watch another 1/3)

      At least they should give you 'compensation' discounts based on outages...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        >Can I pay less if I don't want them?

        IDK, does this work with any other commercial software? Can I get RedHat for half price if I install only 50% of packages available? Can I buy a 50 port switch for half the price if I *promise* I won't ever use more than 25 ports?

        1. stiine Silver badge

          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.

        2. JamesTGrant
          Thumb Up

          License per interface

          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.

      2. stiine Silver badge
        Facepalm

        wow many channels do you have?

        We don't watch more than 5 of the 300+ available channels. Ever. I've tried to convince my S.O. that we could save $200/month by dropping cable and using one or two of the streaming services...but...

  9. SecretSonOfHG

    My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

    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...

    1. Alumoi Silver badge

      Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

      ... some of them may find that LibreOffice does everything they need... Except compatibility with MSOffice. Oh well, not even MSOffice is compatible with itself so you may have something.

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Linux

        Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

        have you read THIS El Reg article yet?

        1. Alumoi Silver badge

          Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

          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.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

            So Word isn't fully compatible with LibreOffice. Not entirely unexpected as I never found to to be fully compatible between versions of itself.

          2. stiine Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

            I HAVEN'T read the other article. Did it say which program isn't actually following the ODT spec as expected?

          3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

            "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.

        2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

          Re: have you read

          You're starting to repeat yourself, grandpa.

          Might want to take those meds.

  10. msknight
    Mushroom

    Loads of bells and whistles

    ... 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.

  11. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities

    ...and over 1200 new vulnerabilities.

    1. stiine Silver badge

      Re: In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities

      I think you're giving them too much credit.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities

      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.

    3. Pirate Dave Silver badge
      Pirate

      Re: In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities

      I'd offer to print out the list of 1200 vulnerabilities, but it seems IT has disabled printing on my box. Hmm, I wonder what that's all about...

  12. Howard Sway Silver badge

    In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities including ... raise hand

    "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?

    1. Sandtitz Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities including ... raise hand

      "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.

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: In 2020 alone we released over 300 new capabilities including ... raise hand

      "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 :-)

  13. a_yank_lurker

    Greedy Scum

    This is why I hate subscriptions.

  14. sharpwolverine

    How much would I pay

    I would pay $1 if I can get Office without the bullshit. The vast majority of the features they have added, I have never used and don't see being used.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How much would I pay

      Check eBay. Maybe somebody's got an Office2003 CD with key for sale for $1.

      (it's a joke, but, eh, hell, Office2000/2003 used to work pretty damn well)

  15. ronkee

    Cloud growth is accelerating!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Cloud growth is accelerating! On the east coast, heading toward Maine.

  16. pip25
    Devil

    Totally not a monopoly

    No, sir. Nothing to see here, move along.

  17. bsimon

    Everybody will end up paying the price

    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!

  18. Aussie Doc
    Pint

    Optional sensible title here

    "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.

  19. Rgen

    Monopoly do have its privileges

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