I truly despise all Microsoft software, from Windows 10/11 to SQL Server, Visual Studio and lastly Office/M365. But enterprises love it and it will often cost them millions to migrate to something else.
Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
401–410 of 593 posts
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#402Earlier 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.
It’s akin to being in the AWS ecosystem and having to switch to Oracle. It’s less so MS Office but rather the SAAS and enterprise security stuff in 365
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#403Here 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…
Europe is doing a pretty good job on slowly veering off this addiction. Might be worth reaching out to them for knowledge sharing or two
Is it? The whole thing about replacing MS with OpenOffice and the LibreOffice or etc. has been going on for decades in Europe. Usually it’s just talk or a few municipalities that try it and then silently revert back to MS soon after.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#404Earlier 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office 500 million users. Just because you haven't heard it doesn't mean an alternative doesn't exist.
While there does not seem to be a maintained snap or flagpole package available, the company behind WPS Office releases DEBs and RPMs it seems: https://www.tech2geek.net/how-to-install-wps-office-on-linux...
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#405Most 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.
Multiple people being able to edit the same file simultaneously with no or minimal issues is pretty bug, though…
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#406Most 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.
SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#407Most 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 main feature post 98 is that the file format is zipped xml documents. Before that it was proprietary binaries.
Lambdas, PowerQuery and Python support on Excel aren't in Excel 98.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#408Most 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.
There have been huge changes and improvements in Excel
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Multiple people being able to edit the same file simultaneously with no or minimal issues is pretty bug, though…
It generally doesn't work though. There are usually huge delays to the point of it being unusable.
Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 imp…
Thanks for your honest opinion. Not sure why you were downvoted.