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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

#271

Post by wvenable »

discreteevent wrote: post #258
wvenable wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I just did a major refactor of a project to move it many versions up on a framework and whole process was effectively vibe coded. I'd estimate I did in a couple of days what would have taken a couple of weeks.

That's good and expect that could be shaved down even more. I was spending most of time just waiting for it do the work.

But I don't know if that fundamentally changes the situation or not. We've had steady improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#272

Post by indolering »

The healthcare industry is basically locked into 365 due to a lack of alternatives supporting HIPAA.

Google Workplace theoretically can be configured, but it doesn't cover basic stuff like information in contacts. So if ANYONE in your organization (like an outreach coordinator) adds a patient and puts notes into the contact field, it's a HIPAA violation. There is no way to effectively police that.

I wish the regulations were written such that messaging apps, office suites, etc over a certain percentage of revenue had to qualify for HIPAA by default. It's absurd how many small shops just do everything in over WhatsApp/iMessage/Gmail/iCould, etc.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#273

Post by jimnotgym »

adornKey wrote: post #58
sneak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no foss competitor to Excel.

Libre Office Calc is pretty similar to Excel for general use. For importing csv files it has always been superior to Excel. Some niche areas in Calc are also better than Excel. Inflexible users are locked into Excel, but for general purpose use Calc is all you need.

When developers tell me that I could use Calc rather than Excel, I ask them if they would be OK being forced to use Emacs or Vim, whichever is the opposite of what they spent the last decade perfecting.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#274

Post by bluedino »

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.

How did it get this way?

A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember.

Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications.

It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#275

Post by jimnotgym »

marcosdumay wrote: post #211
kristjank wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm an accountant, I get correct answers in Excel because I have been using it for 20 years and know how to do this.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#276

Post by jimnotgym »

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.

Perhaps serious finance professionals learnt double entry accounting, checks and balances etc. and know how to avoid those errors?

Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#277

Post by bangaladore »

_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

If you think there are competitors, you are clearly mistaken of what exactly O365 is.

Nobody offers what Microsoft bundles here. From editors, to storage, to communication to identity to management.

And I say this as someone who hates dealing with Microsoft and their products.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#278

Post by jimnotgym »

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.

And a devops pipeline developed by a recent graduate is guaranteed 100% error free?

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#279

Post by maxerickson »

JohnFen wrote: post #126
notepad0x90 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could agree with this, but the ecosystem lock-in is too great. They might lose business for sure but it may not put a dent in their revenue at all. If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smal…

> If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc. At least in my workplace, people do their best to avoid using sharepoint and onedrive anyway.

Are there downsides to OneDrive?

I can see being resistant to change, haven't had issues with it (and have benefitted from the auto save quite a lot).

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#280

Post by jimnotgym »

WorldMaker wrote: post #176
noosphr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Exc…

>The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"),

If the finance team suggested you have to write all of your code in C using Emacs would you be OK with that?

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