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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

#481

Post by buccal »

shevy-java wrote: post #476

We need to create an office suite that really allows us to get rid of those milking corporations. I am not just thinking LibreOffice - I am actually thinking that an office suite can be used globally AND can also be at the least in part be co-funded by governments. The exact amount and procedure I omit here (can be many things), but it is no longer acceptable that a single greedy corporation keeps on milking schools…

Speaking of online use please see: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#482

Post by hex-m »

AnonHP wrote: post #164
mrbluecoat wrote: post #100

Switched to the free OnlyOffice a year ago and never looked back: https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE

Wow, I hadn’t heard about this before. I like that it’s FOSS with AGPL 3. The OnlyOffice screenshots of the spreadsheet application look beautiful (compared to the ugly LibreOffice Calc ones). It says that it works with ODS files (which LibreOffice Calc uses). Any gotchas to be aware of with OnlyOffice?

It can't handle OpenDocument files (odt, odp, ods) well. Only a one-way import is supported. https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/docs/userguides/document_e...

There are parts that are not released under a Free Software license but that's unclear from their marketing-communication. #openWashing

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#483

Post by juergbi »

zoobab wrote: post #426
dijit wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java is optional, not used for any of the core office functionality. You can build and use LibreOffice completely without Java.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#484

Post by Tokkemon »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #64

They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026 [0]. Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files. The solution for that? Run a powershell script to convert all your publisher files to (uneditable) PDF. There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that…

Except Publisher was never good compared to the competition.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#485

Post by creata »

_fat_santa wrote: post #118
lewisjoe wrote: post #91

At this point Microsoft office suite is practically a monopoly. Governments around the world rely on it. Every big enterprise and every business needs it. The spec for office documents was authored by Microsoft( and approved by Microsoft!). The spec is basically the docx datastructure published publicly as a standard - which makes building competing office suites even harder. Given the situation there isn't much cust…

> At this point Microsoft office suite is practically a monopoly. There are loads of competitors in the space. Google Docs, LibeOffice, OnlyOffice, WPS Office, and I'm sure there are many others in the space that are lesser known. All of these are compatible with Office formats.

> All of these are compatible with Office formats.

To a limited extent, for the reasons that the person you're replying to laid out.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#486

Post by rzerowan »

rprend wrote: post #292
dabockster wrote: post #251

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…

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.

If doing it from scratch, if jumping off from an already established product - could work, along with name recognition.

If there was one that i would put that could go head to head and possibly pull it off would be Corel[1], their suite is pretty comprehensive along with their collaborative suite.

Althogh from their businesss model seems they are content to maintain a narrow market and possible still remember getting burned by MS in the early days.

[1] https://www.corel.com/en/all-products/

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#487

Post by elbear »

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.

Likely because some people don't like to hear about positive experiences with LLMs.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#488

Post by jnd-cz »

lenkite wrote: post #473
MangoToupe wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can believe you not hearing about Sharepoint. But not hearing about Onedrive is basically impossible if you have used a Windows machine in the last decade.

Yeah, one may not use it but it's hard to ignore when Office apps suggest you save the document to the cloud as a default. I do avoid it and don't really need any collaboration but I understand that I'm minority. On my home workstation (which is mainly used for video editing) I have only local account so I don't get sucked into more MS services. But at this point you have to actively try to get around the default setup with online account and cloud apps, so it's indeed hard to ignore.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#489

Post by snarfy »

dabockster wrote: post #251
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.

> 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…

Outside of any engineering issues there are a plethora of regulatory and compliance barriers. I think this is actually a much bigger issue than lack of developers.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#490

Post by usrusr »

tsimionescu wrote: post #398
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.

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…

> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.

Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.

But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.

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