Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#591

Post by dabockster » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:26 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #310

shiroiuma wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope. Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not in…

Every now and then I forget why the common man hates our industry nowadays, but luckily this forum always reminds me

HN is such a meme at this point for all the bad reasons. It's why I'd bail on this site again if other social media wasn't worse.

"Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192577

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#592

Post by dabockster » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

6510 wrote: post #540

tallanvor wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is perfectly fine for China, but no western government or company who hopes to do business with them will consider this, and for good reason.

hah, my comment appears much more naive than I thought possible. WPS apparently has 80% market share in Chinese government and state owned enterprise. They used MS from 2000-2005, In 2006 they released Uniform Office Format (UOF) which MS doesn't support(!?) UOF works better with Chinese fonts. 2012 Kingsoft offered Enterprise WPS and became the standard.

And ODF is largely a EU standard that people online love to pretend is universally used.

Re: Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

#593

Post by 1718627440 » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

dabockster wrote: post #589

1718627440 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do you. Last time I needed it, setting up libpam-mysql was fairly quick.

Active Directory is a very no-code tool and has a ton of documentation and certifications online, no college degree required. And it's built by paid devs with a verifiable software supply chain. I just looked up libpam-mysql and it is not no-code at all. And it looks like an unpaid community project which allows contributions from anywhere. That's not a true replacement.

It is so simple, that the whole documentation fits in the README. All you need to do is to tell it the table and column names of your existing database and of you go. If you have something more complicated you can also put arbitrary SQL statements in there.

So my configuration is this (I only redacted the company name, the remaining is copied verbatim):

    users.host               = /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
    users.database           = Company
    users.db_user            = mail
    users.db_passwd          = $(secret-tool lookup user mail@mysql)
    users.table              = User
    users.user_column        = username
    users.password_column    = password
    users.password_crypt     = Y

> and it is not no-code at all

Then tell me how I put your "no-code tool" into the VCS?

> no college degree required

Yeah, which nearly everyone has, but now you need to run through tons of certification programs instead. Which cost a lot of money, so you have the "Certified Rockstar Active Directory Consultant Adviser (TM)"

> it looks like an unpaid community project

> built by paid devs with a verifiable software supply chain.

Which is how most FOSS OS work, which have way more of a verifiable supply chain than your proprietary closed-source OS from Microsoft.

> it is not no-code at all. no college degree required.

Which totally matters, because you want random Joe who hasn't even finished college to be able to mess around with the company authentication setup.