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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

#451

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.

Office 365 these days is SSO (Include Enterprise cloud apps in the bargain),Cloud Documents, Email, Teams(Telephony and Chat) . Word, Excel and Outlook, what outsiders think of as "office" client side apps, are just a gimme. Heck thats just in brief, most of my customers are in deeper than that. Throw in Cloud Compute, and VDI as experiences that are just that much easier using Azure and 365 than other providers.

Not to mention, the data guarantees around Copilot are super enterprise compatible. Its not that companies want copilot, its that they know if they don't provide a solution, users will desire path into something with dodgy data security. So they provide "The Best" in the IBM sense of protecting the business and their jobs, which is Copilot.

It takes a bit of doing but your end state is, user logs into PC, signs in SSO, they get all their apps (remote and local), their emails, their documents, their collab and neither they or you need to think about it.

Oh and to continue, theres the whole Purview suite which is purpose built to integrate into large business data security incidents. I know of MSPs who wont be seen without Exchanges litigation hold / related tools because they have been saved from prosecution. Defender has not just grown more tentacles its like 3 different complete octopi at this point. Defender for Endpoint is particularly difficult to get away from because it does so damn much in the way of logging and monitoring for very little standup cost.

If you sat down most large orgs and created a list of what they may need to replace if they were getting rid of Office365 + supporting/supported features you would probably find its a lot more work. They are everywhere. Theres a turnkey(ish) microsoft solution that grows out the side of 365s head for every big business problem.

Intune. Hello. Man it just keeps going on.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Nope.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libre office can mostly replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint. But Office 365 or M365 (or whatever the brand name is today) is a huge suite of cloud collaboration and administration tools, including personal and corporate-level cloud storage, app delivery, integration with enterprise accounts and other corporate tools, email, and many other more niche/obscure things. At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word…

And what if that is actually useful ? I guess email ?

In enterprise? All of it.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#454
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 makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible."

.. until it doesn't.

There is a very good reason why switching away from M365 is almost impossible.

There is a very good reason why Microsoft offers free consultancy for a while if you just keep using M365.

Microsoft has made the world dependent on them. They are one of the biggest corporations that use drug lord tactics to keep its users.

The European Union sees it and is trying to fight it with all its might. Which is very very difficult when you're fighting a company that has more power than certain governments. It's like fighting the drug lord while still purchasing opiods from him.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, co…

> And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder. Cross-platform compatibility is trivial with modern tooling IMO.

On the surface level, building/compiling/running, maybe... But properly integrating with a given platform (or hell, version of platform!) is a whole new world of pain. :(

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#456
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.

> plenty of developer talent > number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off There aren’t the same thing. > “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emo…

>Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.

It would be a huge undertaking. You have to use tens of different software packages who weren't designed to work with each other, unlike MS offering. Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#457
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…

> 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.

There are thousands of alternatives, but they are not connected as seamlessly like Microsoft would like to think you it all is.

On Microsoft admin/entra/management webpages each weblink does something completely different, yet it provides a very convenient interface.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree in terms of the cloud capabilities. When it is used properly . The cloud stuff is very useful. I currently have a document that is going through multiple versions with about 8 people, with different expertise collaborating. Some have edit privs, some only have review. The ability for everyone to work on it simultaneously, with version history and no more document-v12-copy3_FINAL_FINALv2 is most welcome.

Multiplayer PowerPoint is the single largest advance in the business world since the spreadsheet. If used properly.

The ironic thing about satire is that sometimes it is very difficult to tell apart from the thing being satirized.

So, like, was that satire? I got a good laugh out of "Multiplayer PowerPoint" either way.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally. Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not…

> It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (b…

>Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.

I was working at a particular organisation 13 years ago, and we were tired. Everything was a half completed project. Everything needed work. One of the file servers was busted. We had cobbled together enough to make the customer experience ok, but the guts were on the deck.

The organisation expanded, hired a new CTO, moved the old Pseudo CTO to an architect role. New CTO sat down with everyone in the team for a 1 on 1 chat.

He asked what the biggest issue was, I said we needed time to fix everything and make it work. He said everyone on the team told him the same thing. That we have a solid environment and it just needs to be completed.

Next day he announces a shift to the cloud. We had all our priorities suspended as we forced 365 and Azure into everything. I bailed like 3 weeks later.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#460
post #438

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.

XLOOKUP is so nice though. The other stuff I can live without, especially the UI on data connections changing all the time and the connections breaking anyway. Word 97 was basically feature complete though (if buggy - the same bugs persist today of course), including track changes and compare/merge documents. The killer feature now is being able to work on the same document with multiple people and seeing their chang…

FWIW, both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice support XLOOKUP. In fact LibreOffice has over 500 Excel formulae, which is very close to the number of formulae Excel has.

Unless you use a lot of VBA (and you can't translate it to Python), or you've got some proprietary COM addin that you can't live without, LibreOffice's Calc is a pretty damn good replacement for Excel for the majority of users.

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