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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

#251

Post by dabockster »

wvenable wrote: post #243
amanzi wrote: post #240

Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too. The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoin…

> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.

And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#252

Post by wvenable »

dabockster wrote: post #251
wvenable wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, co…

I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally.

Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#253

Post by mosura »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #249
mosura wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am perfectly happy with the original statement.

Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that? The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors becau…

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#254

Post by xxpor »

flakeoil wrote: post #38
bix6 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Planning_Analytics

>When Visicalc was released, Perez became convinced that it was the ideal user interface for his visionary product: the Functional Database. With his friend Jose Sinai formed the Sinper Corporation in early 1983 and released his initial product, TM/1 (the "TM" in TM1 stands for "Table Manager"). Sinper was purchased by Applix in 1996, which was purchased by Cognos in late 2007, which was in itself acquired mere months later by IBM.[3][2]

TM1 is widely used as a way to interface with official ledgers.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#255

Post by dabockster »

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.

Which is funny because here in Seattle there is starting to be a resurgence of DTP to some degree. But it's very underground and, being already in a tech hub, likely very niche from a macroeconomics viewpoint.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#256

Post by dabockster »

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.

Not the same feature set at all. And doesn't LibreOffice still have decade+ long issues on anything that isn't strictly word processing?

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#257

Post by dabockster »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #232
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.

I came to say something similar. Office 2000 seems more than sufficient for everybody outside of some very specific niches. The success of the comparatively much more basic Google Docs and Sheets are proof of this. Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.

Office 2000/XP with the XML based file formats would be perfect.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#258

Post by discreteevent »

wvenable wrote: post #252
dabockster wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, co…

I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally. Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not…

Do you think that LLMs will do much to help to alleviate this?

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#259

Post by dabockster »

quantumwannabe wrote: post #237
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.

They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year. Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.

> the last pre-subscription version

Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

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