Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out Only Office. It's an almost total copy of the 365 aesthetic.
Yeah, that's the opposite of what I want, then I'll just continue using Excel... What I want is for someone to figure out a better UI and better UX, not just copy what's out there.
Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
321–330 of 593 posts
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
When all you know is Hammer... I agree and you'd be surprised at the response when I showed some of them how to do it in python numpy.
I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.
Dinosaurs gonna dinosaur. Teach his kids about the virtues of source control and testability, and the problem will be resolved in the next generation.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#323Here 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…
IT departments often lack the skills and/or desire to use anything but MS
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#324Earlier 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.
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…
Thank you for doing the lord's work, brother.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#325Earlier 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.
And a devops pipeline developed by a recent graduate is guaranteed 100% error free?
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Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's how Linux is written so they must have great taste.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#327They 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…
I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too. It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out…
I'm going to imagine anyone who needs to make fold-out leaflets is going to end up either doing it in Creative Cloud (i.e. InDesign), or these days, will just do it in Figma or Canva.
Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
In all fairness I think Notion and Google have made some level of headway for FWIW.
Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#329Most 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.
O365 lock-in is all about Outlook. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.
Is there really any moat around Outlook, though?
This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope. Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not in…
Suggesting libreoffice as an alternative to Office 365 is crazy.