This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I'm sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.
As for businesses that part stinks... once you get integrated with all the services offered, it's going to take a lot to back out since it's not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It's awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn't anticipate this then they didn't do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that's updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
Phew, this was a good reminder since I was meaning to cancel my subscription anyway. It was going to auto renew in 2 days. 😬
Make it too expensive and people will switch to Google docs.
Google workspace just pulled the same crap with Gemini
Last week at us.
First question I asked the evil twin was: "How can I deactivate Gemini and never hear from it again?" Support article poped up, where must opt out from some Labs setting or some bs, but only a workspace admin can do it.
Ended up with blocking that flare button with uBo. Problem solved.
The fact it costs anything at all, let alone a subscription, should be enough for the working class to seek other options.
This generation has sold itself out to the lowest bidder.
Excel is the deal breaker on that. My last company was all Google products and auth, but I still had to buy Excel for the accounting and HR teams.
Um excel certainly has its places, but accounting? Don't they have actual dedicated software for accounting? HR? Like payroll? Again don't they have actual software for that?
And I was thinking personal use, whose costs were posted. $100 a year, fuck that.
It's hard to believe, but I work at a Fortune 100 company that's still heavily reliant on Excel.
Sure, we have specific software as System of Record (Oracle suite, mainly). But for all the day to day estimating and calculating and reporting and other noodling, people routinely export to Excel and play with numbers from there.
The point is you can use google docs or Libreoffice for day to day mundane things.
It's only the huge power features that you need Excel for, maybe in engineering. For accounting when you get to that power feature point I'm surprised there isn't dedicated software.
Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it's not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.
From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it's clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn't really need Excel... but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I'd probably switch to something else.
Like it's a fun number cruncher, but for serious accounting that's tied into point of sale, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc you really should be running something dedicated. That's why there are all these software companies making bank when from the outside you can't quite figure out what they do.
Protip on excel, when you start a new sheet ctrl+a, ctrl+1, change to number.
If they actually bundled a game pass subscription with it and made a proper Microsoft complete subscription they could have softened the bad press they're getting on this (and giving customers something they've wanted for a while)
That and the fact that they've nearly doubled the price of the subscription to add a limited credit based feature just looks pretty slimy
Why on earth would they bundle gamepass into Office365? Office365 is pretty much used for business and educational institutions. Everybody else is a rounding error.
The overlap between Office365 owners and Xbox gamers is extremely small.
You'd just end up pissing everybody off by combining them
"They've added how much to the price by adding this gamer nonsense?! I don't need that crap, I want office software!"
"They've added how much to the price by including fucking PowerPoint and Outlook?! I don't need that crap, I want to play games!"
And not to defend MS, but a 43% increase isn't nearly doubling. A 100% increase would be doubling.
They should have made it opt-in instead of opt-out IMHO. You can still get the old subscription when you renew, but you have to jump through a couple of hoops. If you do nothing you just get "upgraded" for no reason.
