This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"The cost of running the hallucination machine is too expensive so instead of charging people who want to use it, we have instead decided to charge everyone who uses any of our services even if they don't want to use the hallucination machine"
So I've never used Microsoft office because I could never afford it. I went from notepad to wordpad to OpenOffice to libreoffice. I've never had a single issue even as a professional not using word. I actually really enjoy writing as a hobby and I just don't get this copiolet thing. Why would I want something to do the thing I like doing? Screw that.
For professional settings, I understand the theoretical appeal of ai writing. A lot of people don't like writing emails, but they have to for work. Many of those same people fret about tone or presentation, because silly office politics reasons (real or one-sidedly imagined in their heads.)
The solution, really is workplaces just need to cut down on the useless drivel emails and people need to be ok with short, no frills emails.
There are tons more applications in the workplace. For example, one of the people in my team is dyslexic and sometimes needs to write reports that are a few pages long. For him, having the super-autocorrect tidy up his grammar makes a big difference.
Sometimes I have a list of say 200 software changes that would be a pain to summarise, but where it's intuitively easy for me to know if a summary is right. For something like a changelog I can roll the dice with the hallucination machine until I get a correct summary, then tidy it up. That takes less than a tenth of the time than writing it myself.
Sometimes writing is necessary and there's no way to cut down the drivel unfortunately. Talking about professional settings of course - having the Large Autocorrect writing a blog post or a poem for you is a total misuse of the tool in my opinion.
As a software dev, I have the feeling you just described texts that nobody will ever read :-) or so I feel.
Props for the dyslexic help tho.
Wow Lotta folks gonna discover that LibreOffice is much better than MS Office. Not to mention, free.
There are home users of Microsoft 365?
I'm not shaming but I kinda am. Like WTF is wrong with you? You pay for free shit.
Office employees don't get to choose.
Actually I have admin access to my work laptop, so while my employer pays for what ever the fuck they pay for I frequently use FOSS instead.
I do it to make a point.
COPILOT IS NOW A PAID FEATURE?????? hell nah, microsoft be banking on their users.
Quickest enshittification.
Fr
Wait, they think people want Copilot? Like enough to pay money for it?
They are banking on customers being too invested in office to switch.
I think that might be their plan for all their products at this point. Just existing though inertia.
For reasons I won't get into, I had a chance to peruse the training program for the sales force of Azure and their strategy actually is telling their potential clients that they already subscribe to Office 365 so they might as well use their cloud too.
Yeah, it does not surprise me. The thing that does is how common the approach seems to be in big established tech companies. I mean, it generally never works out (look at IBM, Intel, Sun, and to some degree Apple).
That with a side of suppressing a competitor. Similar to how they include Teams for corporate plans. If it is included in your M$ apps suite, then your company might want to cut back on Slack and just make due.
MS teams sucks so fucking much, I don't understand how such a large company can make such a deficient product.
It's a safe bet. I wonder if enterprise pricing is that high.
Copilot Is literally ChatGPT With a diff logo and name.
I use both for work, copilot is worse.
Copilot for Teams is extremely useful. Recap meetings and being able to search for specific parts. People hate on AI but in this case they are definitely downplaying the capabilities.
But to be fair I'm not the one paying the bill
If meetings are happening so long and going in so frequently that nobody can make sense of them without an ai summary, might I suggest there are too many meetings?
I say this as someone who used to work at a place that had meetings about meetings to figure out why so much time was wasted in meetings.
I mean we can debate root cause and corporate culture and everything, but at the end of the day these meetings exist and copilot make them better.
Man, I don't know about even that... It gets stuff wrong all the time. My boss LOVES his AI bot that joins all meetings (even if he doesn't) to summarize stuff. Occasionally I look over the summary it produces; it's about 50% actually correct, 25% ambiguous not wrong but not what I meant, and 25% flat out wrong / opposite of what I meant. I'm sure he relies on the results, ugh. One time I went through the summary and corrected it all, but I don't have time for that for all meetings.
Copilot in my experience is pretty accurate, even if not perfect. Plus it timestamps the meeting so you know where it's drawing it's conclusions from.
For anyone who doesn't already know the good FOSS alternatives:
additionally Onlyoffice (But Onlyoffice isnt fully open source)
OnlyOffice, you say?
😏
OnlyOffice doesn't like open document formats though.
Oh
Preaching to the choir here but LibreOffice has been excellent since my MSOffice license expired. Unless you're working in an enterprise setting with MS-specific macros or online collaboration, there's no reason to be paying for basic document editing software in 2025.
There are also self-hosted and open-sourced collaborative editing suites available that I haven't tried yet, but there are plenty of options
Even if you need microsoft office for some random file you can use their free web version. Well it's been a couple years since I last needed it I'm assuming it still exists
Fair enough, but if you're trying to avoid data collection then open-sourced projects are preferable
Does it save files locally or only cloud? I want to move away from google docs/sheets.
I think locally only, LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.
Fun story, it's called office 365 as when you see the price you'll turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Ok that doesn't really work but God I love that stupid joke.
Anyway I haven't used office personally for ages and never seem to run into real compatibility issues with the meager personal/business overlap in my situation.
It made me chuckle a little imaging that you do a full 365 degree spin Infront of Microsoft and then walk away (in an awkward way), instead of 180 degrees to walk the opposite direction haha
At the right distance it's just enough pivot to give them a spiteful shoulder check on the way out.
Technically speaking with 365* of rotation if you are far enough away you will be able to walk past microsoft, so this is possible.
Because of the Earth's curvature you mean?
365 spin, then realizing your mistake and awkwardly walking backwards out of the room
worlds most over glorified over priced office website that runs like a slug
