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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

#211

Post by marcosdumay »

kristjank wrote: post #193
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…

It's interesting how views differ; I have never been able to make decent scientific graphs in Excel while Calc worked fine for me.

Calc has many features focused on correctness and reliability. Excel is a joke on both of those accounts.

Turns out close to 100% of the spreadsheet users out there don't care about that. It's unnerving and absurd, and IMO, what is even the point of all the effort of entering your data and working it if you don't care about the result being correct? But that's how the world is.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#212

Post by binarymax »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #191

Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.

The only main feature post 98 is that the file format is zipped xml documents. Before that it was proprietary binaries.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#214

Post by aydyn »

Does anyone else remember when it was possible to include interactive graphs ala plotly in powerpoint?

Because it isn't possible now.

Office just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. The only thing they have going for them is vendor lock-in, and that's sad.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#215

Post by dangus »

gary_0 wrote: post #78
hypeatei wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Have you stopped and thought about what you're saying or are you just assuming this is expensive because it's Microsoft and they're Bad?

Let's actually look at what you get for your money (I'll just go by current consumer pricing since it's easy to find/understand):

Microsoft 365 Family:

$130/year

6 people, 1TB storage per person

Each person gets 5 devices for all Office apps

Higher AI usage limits than free (only primary user, not shared)

Let's try to buy this from someone else:

Google: $99/year for 2TB, shared between 6 people, but your limit is 2TB total. No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI which bumps this all up to $20/month with no additional storage. I can't actually see how much additional storage costs to make this equivalent to 1TB/person without signing up.

Apple: $420/year to get 6TB of storage shared between 6 people. iWork apps are garbage, no AI included. iCloud+ does have some side features like private relay, custom domain email, etc.

Proton Family: 3TB, $288 a year

pCloud: 10TB family lifetime plan is $1500, equivalent to about 10 years of paying for Office 365.

All this to say, tl;dr, Microsoft is actually offering one of the better deals out there especially if you want to give a significant amount of storage to each family member at a low cost.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#216

Post by trinix912 »

mosura wrote: post #210
trinix912 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I did not mean this.

So please tell us what you did mean.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#217

Post by paradox460 »

mdasen wrote: post #148
lewisjoe wrote: post #91

At this point Microsoft office suite is practically a monopoly. Governments around the world rely on it. Every big enterprise and every business needs it. The spec for office documents was authored by Microsoft( and approved by Microsoft!). The spec is basically the docx datastructure published publicly as a standard - which makes building competing office suites even harder. Given the situation there isn't much cust…

At this point? I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files. Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite…

I got a bad grade in a highschool English class because the teacher didn't like the doc file generated by StarOffice. My dad came round the school raising hell and got her to grade the paper on contents, saying if they wanted me to have office they could buy a copy of it. I got an A- after that

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#218

Post by Guestmodinfo »

chris_wot wrote: post #115
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…

Install LibreOffice.

I used Scribus. Top choice for replacing Publisher by open source software. Scribus is very intuitive and with enough time I could churn out a beautiful looking effective resume on my first try

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#219

Post by dragonwriter »

dangus wrote: post #215
gary_0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you stopped and thought about what you're saying or are you just assuming this is expensive because it's Microsoft and they're Bad? Let's actually look at what you get for your money (I'll just go by current consumer pricing since it's easy to find/understand): Microsoft 365 Family: $130/year 6 people, 1TB storage per person Each person gets 5 devices for all Office apps Higher AI usage limits than free (only pr…

> No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI

Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#220

Post by stuaxo »

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…

Powerpoint for DTP... did the person writing that know what Publisher even is ?
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