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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

#511

Post by maxerickson »

JohnFen wrote: post #493
maxerickson wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there downsides to OneDrive? I can see being resistant to change, haven't had issues with it (and have benefitted from the auto save quite a lot).

It's not at all about being "resistant to change". OneDrive has been around long enough that it doesn't really count as "change" anymore. There are downsides to OneDrive. Topping the list is the risk of data loss. Every dev here has at least one story of OneDrive getting confused in a way that led to data loss (that's usually what got them to start avoiding using it). It can also be inconvenient and get in the way in…

Is this the SharePoint backed OneDrive that you get with a business subscription?

I've had some irritations with it, but overall having versioning has been a much bigger benefit than the hassle.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#512

Post by thw_9a83c »

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…

> They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026.

You have my sympathy. I was also a frequent MS Publisher user, and I always felt that not many people knew about it. It's a useful, simple DTP package suitable for many less complex page layout scenarios. After the End-of-Support announcement, I switched to the LibreOffice Draw already. Fortunately, LibreOffice Draw works quite nicely as a Publisher replacement for me. There is also Scribus [1].

[1]: https://www.scribus.net/

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#513

Post by insane_dreamer »

bux93 wrote: post #441
insane_dreamer wrote: post #119

The only reason people still need office -- other than a niche of advanced Excel users -- is because no one, despite the last several decades, has managed to make a 100% compatible DOCX editor (not LibreOffice, not Apple Pages, not Google Docs). I'm guessing it's because there are aspects of it that MSFT keeps secret? The only reason I still use Word is because I don't want to have to deal with random layout incompat…

DOCX is a terrible format though. If you don't need to edit a document, PDF is more reliable. If you do need to edit, DOCX will invariably fudge up headings, numbering, ToCs, alignment of images/figures, keep-together not working properly for captions or tables, etc. I think for the second usecase someone ought to introduce a completely new format that handles this a lot better. Or maybe the format is already there a…

> DOCX is a terrible format though.

Agreed but it doesn't matter, because it is the de-facto standard.

(Personally, I think WordPerfect was the better doc standard, with visible attribute tags in the text that could be edited.)

> If you don't need to edit a document, PDF is more reliable.

Yes, but the reason you're using a word processor in the first place is because you need to edit the document.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#514

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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…

> > Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

> The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now.

I think the problem is different: those who are capable of pulling off such a task commonly lack the "business credibility" that is necessary so that C-level executives would buy a product from them.

Getting the skills in all these disciplines is a much-more-than-fulltime job. If you spend all your time cramming, you simply don't have time to build this "business credibility".

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#515

Post by ptx »

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.

LibreOffice is derived from OpenOffice.org which is derived from StarOffice which predates Java. When it was acquired by Sun and open-sourced, they added some optional components implemented in Java, but the core application is not a Java application. The GUI is not Swing but their own custom GUI framework (not based on Java).

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#516

Post by bzzzt »

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.

Libre/OpenOffice is a C++ application which uses an homegrown cross-platform GUI toolkit. There were only some minor components written in Java (like mail merge), and I believe LibreOffice has replaced some of them with native code.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#517

Post by aleph_minus_one »

rzerowan wrote: post #486
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.

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…

> 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

Or SoftMaker ([1], [2]) with their product SoftMaker Office ([3], [4]).

[1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker

[3] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#519

Post by caminante »

typon wrote: post #358
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.

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.

"alternative" is doing a lot of lifting here.

While more efficient in some areas, it's missing a lot of quality of life tools plus legal/compliance/security tooling.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#520

Post by aleph_minus_one »

crazygringo wrote: post #506
b3lvedere wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 Europ…

> drug lord tactics to keep its users. What on earth are you talking about? Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. It's a huge logistical challenge, not because of anything Microsoft does, but just because they're different systems and migrating data and processes is inherently hard.

> Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time.

To my knowledge, Google is a worse "data kraken" than Microsoft, so companies are very hesitant to switch to Google; in the companies' opinion such a switch would be a switch from "bad" to "horrific".

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