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Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

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Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#171

Post by timbit42 »

AnonHP wrote: post #162
Aurornis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job. For professionals w…

> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Doc…

Have you tried LO's other interfaces under View > User Interface? There is Standard, Tabbed, and five other variations.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#172

Post by alternatex »

emadb wrote: post #15
_lvbh wrote: post #7

This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever. The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want

Other than Google, what are other competitors that worth evaluating?

Unironically Proton. Seems like they are slowly building their own suite of office tools.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#173

Post by justapassenger »

array_key_first wrote: post #135
sneak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the things you listed are suitable replacements for Excel. None. It has nothing to do with existing files/compatibility. Excel is unparalleled.

The solution is actually just not using Excel. If you're essentially using Excel as a LOB backend and database, that should probably not be in Excel. It's fine if you have a few formulas. As soon as you're busting out macros it's time to sunset the workbook and make an application. There's a lot of God Excel workbooks sitting around on share drives with no audibility or quality control.

Yes, there's many many cases that should likely not be using Excel.

But given that Excel is the second-best tool for everything, world runs on it.

And when you try to build systems to replace Excel for a specific task, you quickly learn how extremely powerful Excel is and how hard is to replace it and add value that customers would care about.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#174

Post by WorldMaker »

mosura wrote: post #81
TheJoeMan wrote: post #64

They 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…

The reality is DTP outside of pro sectors (i.e. these days InDesign) was rendered worthless by how ubiquitous the tooling was. In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home.

A lot of this seems to be related to death of the amateur and semi-pro DTP industries:

1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions).

2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc.

I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death).

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#175

Post by bcrl »

gary_0 wrote: post #33

They 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…

LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#176

Post by WorldMaker »

noosphr wrote: post #73
Aurornis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An application I consulted on was a web interface that made heavy use of the Excel portions of Microsoft Graph so that the finance team could continue to send clients spreadsheets that they could adjust without also sending them the formulas to "steal" (and take other parts of their business elsewhere, to noticeable millions of dollars of project spending habit shifts). The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"), so it was wildly custom solution to figure out where formulas existed in any of the spreadsheets finance felt like giving to the app, build a custom UI for entering the inputs to those formulas, run those formulas most with Microsoft Graph cloud magic/some with other web libraries, and return the results.

If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#177

Post by bhouston »

sneak wrote: post #52
bhouston wrote: post #29

Haven't opened Microsoft Office in I think 7 years. Haven't also used Apple's Office suite either - it is just Google Docs/presentations/sheets/drive for everything. I feel my life is better. They were massive installs and I prefer to have everything online all the time anyhow - just safer and more convenient.

Way more convenient for the FAA702 users, too. If you have absolutely nothing in your documents that you wouldn’t mind giving the FBI to read without a warrant or probable cause, it is possible you are wasting your one and only life. A good example would be anyone in the state-legal cannabis industry. This is still a federal crime (Schedule 1!), and giving cloud providers (and thus DHS without a warrant thanks to FAA…

I am a Canadian. Pot is legal here at the federal level. My province (e.g. Canadian state) runs its own online pot store (hosted on Shopify BTW): https://ocs.ca. It includes various edibles too.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#179

Post by spogbiper »

zkmon wrote: post #9

While businesses definitely don't need all those features, I guess most use it for compatibility sake - to work with existing files and to collaborate with others who use MS Office. What's current state of open-source alternatives that can work with the MS file formats?

It goes beyond the file formats. There is an entire ecosystem of industry specific extensions and plugins that are heavily used in law and accounting firms. These only work with MS office and they are critical to how many businesses operate.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#180

Post by trinix912 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #112
mosura wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is DTP outside of pro sectors (i.e. these days InDesign) was rendered worthless by how ubiquitous the tooling was. In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home.

Sorry but what does this mean? I can't quite parse it. What tooling was ubiquitous?

They probably meant Publisher, which was a part of every more expensive MS Office deal. It was simple to use and much more suitable than Word for simple design jobs (business cards, leaflets, stationary, etc) and with which the "average" MS Office user could now do what was once the domain of DTP "professionals".
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