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Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
71–80 of 593 posts
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#72If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted. There is literally no benefit to this subscription model besides paying for what you already have and what you don't want. None of this stuff needs to be on the cloud even for bigger firms. For the I need/like X in Office 365, it's not worth it from a costs perspective.
They’d get owned by security vulnerabilities in the first hour, fwiw.
Ah yes security, the ultimate shakedown mechanic. Tony Soprano should've been in software sales. "You don't want anything happen to your nice little business do you??"
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they do serious financial work I for sure hope they do not use Excel or any other spread sheet tool. It can go wrong so many ways.
If you think spreadsheets aren’t used in serious finance, you’re going to be very disappointed if you ever have to work with that world.
My first job out of uni was developing a devops pipeline for Excel spreadsheets after one went rogue and cost the broker trader I was hired by $10m in one fun afternoon.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they do serious financial work I for sure hope they do not use Excel or any other spread sheet tool. It can go wrong so many ways.
If you think spreadsheets aren’t used in serious finance, you’re going to be very disappointed if you ever have to work with that world.
Yup, I have. And had to deal with converting "this awesome tool that does X, Y and Z" to an actual multi-user app because it was just so great. You end up discovering that there are tons of miscalculations in these formulas that only surface when you start writing tests for them, and that a lot of the business decisions based on these tools had flawed assumptions.
Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no foss competitor to Excel.
For legacy spreadsheets, you're 100% correct. I'll need to keep a version of Excel around forever. If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want, a perpetual license to Office 2019 runs about $20 and will do that job for me. For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite go…
None of the things you listed are suitable replacements for Excel. None.
It has nothing to do with existing files/compatibility. Excel is unparalleled.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business basic goes from $6 to $7. Business premium is unchanged from $22 to $22. Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game. > The new "features" they're justifying t…
> Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s. There's no substance to this comment. It's pure speculation. If you actually want to look at evidence, look at the recent news that Microsoft has cut AI sales targets in half. > The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap. Ironic t…
> Ironic that you posted this as a comment on HN.
It’s not ironic at all. Posting here was deliberate to highlight the bubble that happens here for consumer products. This comment section has a lot of people evaluating these price hikes as if they were targeted at HN individual users, not for a product targeted at a different audiences and corporate subscriptions.
Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market.
Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
As for AI demand: If you don’t think AI is in demand, you haven’t been looking at the explosive adoption of AI tools from ChatGPT to Sora (consistently high on app charts) by consumers. These products are in high demand, though you’d never know if it your only perspective was through upvoted HN stories and comments.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#77Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universities, etc.)
Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?
I know a few people who use Quantrix for financial modelling. It is an exceptionally nice piece of software, basically the successor of Lotus Improv, with Improv's more robust and auditable separation of data and formulas.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#78They can set whatever price they want. Most customers have no choice but to pay; there is no competitor with anything approaching full compatibility or a similar feature set. Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have maintained a business software monoculture for decades. Nobody has invested significant resources into competing products, just tiny companies and open source volunteers putting out niche alternatives. Mic…
> They can set whatever price they want Then why don't they? I think it's precisely because they don't want anyone "investing significant resources into competing products" There's a line for everyone and current prices obviously aren't too much for a majority of people, including me. I just don't stay subscribed when I'm not using it.
I mean, they kind of are? Obviously they can't set it to a million dollars a month, but where's the ceiling? Five hundred? A thousand? Who knows? And maybe they make it play a 30 second video ad once a day?
They keep getting away with it, and nobody has any idea when the buck will finally stop.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#79They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026 [0]. Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files. The solution for that? Run a powershell script to convert all your publisher files to (uneditable) PDF. There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that…
Weird that with as much as they're pushing Co-Pilot everywhere, they for some reason can't use it to maintain Publisher. Maybe Co-Pilot isn't as good as Microsoft claims.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the price hikes have been received terribly well - their Ultimate game pass service is now $30 a month (in the US), which seems to be pricing out a lot of their members. It now makes a lot more sense for many to just buy games outright.
>I don't think the price hikes have been received terribly well What did I say?
Sorry, it wasn't clear if you were suggesting raising prices was an effective way to recoup the cost of the acquisition. When I wrote my comment, only the first half of yours was showing up.