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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

#341

Post by vee-kay »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #334
stackskipton wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

I am a home user, but I use Zoho's paid email service as a backup and alternative to Gmail and Outlook, and it is pretty decent and extremely affordable.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#342

Post by lll-o-lll »

MangoToupe wrote: post #336
paulddraper wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One word. Cloud.

Sharepoint, onedrive, teams. Everything is integrated and collaborating is trivial. You can’t replicate that with open source.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#343

Post by ezconnect »

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 feature they added is you can't open other Word files so you need a new version.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#344

Post by MangoToupe »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #342
MangoToupe wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One word. Cloud. Sharepoint, onedrive, teams. Everything is integrated and collaborating is trivial. You can’t replicate that with open source.

Ok, but surely google docs does that just as well or even better? I have never even heard of sharepoint and onedrive!

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#345

Post by chii »

shiroiuma wrote: post #301
rprend wrote: post #292

Earlier 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…

You are looking from the perspective of a user of the software - sure, these have enough feature parity to "compete".

But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives.

How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking work? How does audit work? And that's just the surface.

Needs for large enterprises, where you cannot just have John from HR make a new account for the new hire, are often not met by the opensource world.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#346

Post by snuxoll »

crazygringo wrote: post #138
wongarsu wrote: post #14

Considering the last price increase was almost 4 years before this one goes into effect, most of those are pretty modest 1-4%/year increases. In line with inflation. The notable outliers are F1 and F3 which got a lot more expensive Apparently F1 and F3 are "Office 365 for Frontline Workers". F3 is kind of like Office 365 Basic, F1 is stripped down to mostly read-only access plus Microsoft Teams

Seriously. I don't understand why this is even news or posted here. If they were doubling prices or something then of course, raise the alarms. This is not that.

A 5% increase is still a sizable when you consider the number of licenses that even an SMB may have. I don't deal with our MS licensing directly at $DAYJOB, but we've got something like 1300+ employees most (all?) of whom have M365 E5 licenses, that adds up to (roughly) an extra $4K/mo or $48K/yr when it comes time to renew our annual licensing.

Is it going to break the bank and send us into a financial death spiral? Absolutely not. But, you get enough companies deciding to jack up pricing at around the same time and it comes out to a significant increase in our lights-on budget - death by a million cuts hurts just as much as Broadcom raking us over the coals with VMWare license increases.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#348

Post by abixb »

>" One interpretation is that the extra $10 billion from the price increases will offset some of the red ink Microsoft is bleeding because of the investments they’re making in datacenter capacity, hardware, and software needed to make Copilot useful"

Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#349

Post by shiroiuma »

vee-kay wrote: post #335
xstas1 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

They are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do.

A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits.

And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#350

Post by shiroiuma »

chii wrote: post #345
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…

You are looking from the perspective of a user of the software - sure, these have enough feature parity to "compete". But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives. How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking wo…

Large enterprises were doing this stuff with Unix and mainframes long before Microsoft figured out what preemptive multitasking was.
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