Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#331

Post by WorldMaker » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:33 AM UTC

jimnotgym wrote: post #280

WorldMaker wrote: post #176

Earlier 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?

I would like to see the finance team that codes all their own C code and is adamant it needs to be in Emacs, especially because if they are that deep in Emacs I'd be wondering why they are insisting on C rather than Emacslisp or something even more esoteric like GNU Guile or someone's custom Forth to Fortran compiler…

But to answer the question, that is where I finished. We weren't "okay with it" that the finance team insisted on a C# to Excel files in SharePoint/OneDrive via Microsoft Graph turducken. We lived with it because the finance team had enough of the metaphorical keys to the car to be deeply in the driver's seat of that project. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and deliver what the customer wants.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#332

Post by trollbridge » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:34 AM UTC

trinix912 wrote: post #192

jacquesm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange. That's a negative.

For end-users maybe, but for the business' IT who get a working mail server they don't have to mess with, and a whole remote work and videoconferencing package that "just works" and most people already know how to use, it's a hell of a deal.

Kind of hard to understand what it does that Google Workspace + Zoom (or any other provider) doesn't?

I'm seeing a very common pattern of Google Workspace + Google Meet, Zoom seats for people who need to remotely control computers, and then Slack or ones of its competitors for chat.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#333

Post by trollbridge » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:35 AM UTC

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.

Libre Office is great for replicating what Excel did 10 years ago. Excel has a lot of things that power users use (like Power Query) that Libre Office simply isn't even trying to replicate.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

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Post by hoistbypetard » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:36 AM UTC

stackskipton wrote: post #196

hoistbypetard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoho and Collabora spring immediately to mind.

Zoho is crap. Sure, on the tin it comes with 64 different things, but many are poorly integrated and feature set is just enough to be like "Yes, we have that feature."

Interesting. I know I'm not a very demanding user of word processing or presentation software. But I've been using zoho for basic business stuff for one of my businesses since 2019, and I wouldn't call it crap. It's not amazing, but I pay something like $12/user/year. And I get shared docs/sheets/decks + pretty decent email. And their transactional email service (zeptomail) is actually top notch IMO.

What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#335

Post by vee-kay » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:37 AM UTC

xstas1 wrote: post #308

shiroiuma wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They're working on it.

Starting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose. Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads. The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers. Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#336

Post by MangoToupe » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:41 AM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #330

shiroiuma wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? What feature does office 365 have that is so difficult to replace? I'm guessing support but... is there something more obvious?

Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#337

Post by 29athrowaway » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:41 AM UTC

This office suite is less known but great: https://www.freeoffice.com/

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

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Post by vee-kay » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:41 AM UTC

fungi wrote: post #323

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…

IT departments often lack the skills and/or desire to use anything but MS

Reverse argument is true as well.. If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#339

Post by abakker » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:45 AM UTC

amanzi wrote: post #303

doubled112 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft 365 isn't just the office suite though. It's the office suite, email, PIM, chat, wiki/collaboration, document management, and a lot more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_365_applicat...

Exactly - that's what I was trying point out in my original comment. The desktop office apps are actually reasonably easy to swap out for a large portion of people. It's the rest of the M365 suite which is massive.

and, its so cheap. there are alternatives for individual components, but nothing that comes close to being this low cost. And, the ultimate value is that if you buy a niche tool (like notion) then only people with licenses can use it. Everybody at the company has office, so it's easy to share/collaborate. You have to really commit to avoiding office at all if you're going to replace parts of it.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

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Post by couscouspie » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:49 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #319

esafak wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments in Europe are increasingly ditching Microsoft, goaded by souring relations between the continents.

Don't underestimate the rage from citizens who receive important documents and sheets in formats they can't open. Or you can open them but with a warning that some functionality might be lost. (reads like: you might go to prison)

That's a Microsoft problem, not a FOSS problem though.