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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

#421

Post by dijit »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #419
thot_experiment wrote: post #415

I know that modern office has xlookup and other niceties, but if you're not a power user Office 97 off archive.org is like 200mb installed, works just fine on win 10 or under wine, and has the benefit of being written 28 years ago so on a modern computer everything happens imperceptibly fast. I installed the 97 suite like 2 or 3 years ago and I've never looked back.

Is there a reason to use this over LibreOffice? I had until this year a pretty old machine (~11-12 years old at time of replacement, upper midrange at time of purchase) and I never felt like it was slow -- possibly because everything was slow on that machine though and I was stuck in a forest...

LibreOffice definitely feels sluggish.

I give it a pass because it's doing complicated things, it's free software and I also temper my expectations slightly because it's a Java GUI application (and I expect those to be slow).

I would certainly not expect it to be more performant than Office '97.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#422

Post by throwaway2037 »

conception wrote: post #352
wvenable wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!” Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet. The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint. Everything else can be replaced easily and o…

What about Microsoft Outlook & Exchange for email and calendar? To me, that is an incredibly wide moat to cross for enterprise software.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#423

Post by kakacik »

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)

Don't over-estimate that neither.

Things can be done in such ways that there is nothing visibly incompatible (ie scripting behind some forms), you can always just print and fill the document if needed, and anyway most documents are static pdfs with optional plus for filling some fields in computer.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#424

Post by Someone »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #160
spogbiper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? There appear to be templates for this in Powerpoint

You need more than a template if you're going to make a booklet by folding a piece of paper in 4 - half of the "pages" (quarter pages) need to be upside down. In truth, I haven't tried this in Word either, although it appears to be possible in page setup. Maybe I just stopped using Publisher when I started getting duplex printers. Or even stopped needing silly layouts for school projects.

Isn’t that a feature that best sits in the printer dialog, to be used with whatever application you want?

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#425

Post by tonyhart7 »

jdietrich wrote: post #368
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…

To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#426

Post by zoobab »

dijit wrote: post #421
GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason to use this over LibreOffice? I had until this year a pretty old machine (~11-12 years old at time of replacement, upper midrange at time of purchase) and I never felt like it was slow -- possibly because everything was slow on that machine though and I was stuck in a forest...

LibreOffice definitely feels sluggish. I give it a pass because it's doing complicated things, it's free software and I also temper my expectations slightly because it's a Java GUI application (and I expect those to be slow). I would certainly not expect it to be more performant than Office '97.

Being written in Java there is no surprise here.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#427

Post by traceroute66 »

trollbridge wrote: post #332
trinix912 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because ...

     - Its one package
     - All the non-tech users already know Microsoft
     - Most IT techies will be VERY familiar with Microsoft
     - If you are migrating from on-Prem then it is highly likely you've got Exchange on-prem.
Add on top of that, you can (depending on package) get Active Directory ("Entra") and MDM ("Intune"). So you get credential management and the ability to push out Group Policies to your user's machines.

Look, I'm the last person to defend Microsoft. But if you are a Microsoft shop then it does, sadly, make a lot of sense to take a Microsoft sub.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#428

Post by [deleted] »

sharpy wrote: post #360
shiroiuma wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And decided that it was cheaper and easier to just outsource it to Microsoft. Because doing it in today's environment - different work computers, backend servers, mobile devices, etc - is much more complicated than just managing permissions on a mainframe.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#429

Post by 1718627440 »

sharpy wrote: post #360
shiroiuma wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And decided that it was cheaper and easier to just outsource it to Microsoft. Because doing it in today's environment - different work computers, backend servers, mobile devices, etc - is much more complicated than just managing permissions on a mainframe.

Distributed databases are a solved problem (besides maybe performance). Offloading account management to arbitrary databases too. Why everyone is using Microsoft is, because then they have someone to blame, instead of needing to point at themselves.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#430

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

discreteevent wrote: post #410
wvenable wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t get it either. I feel people are increasingly knee-jerk about downvoting, triggered by certain phrases, perhaps „vibe-coding“ in this case.
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