Interesting that the deadline is checks notes one day before the Nightmare deadline. Definitely not a coincidence, right?
What’s the Nightmare deadline? I’m out of the loop on Microsoft news.
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
71–80 of 401 posts
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#72When did "hate the customer" become a thing?
Look at generational C-suite shifts in Silicon Valley. Post the financial crisis, all regulatory efforts concentrated on banks and brokers for a decade, and tech firms were given a free rein. Boards apparently chose 'growth over anything else' types to lead.
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#73I would encourage affected customers to go to small claims court. You’ll probably get a default judgment. Small claims court was created for just this type of issue.
IMO it would be better if there was a general mechanism to prevent profiting from corrupt business practices. For example, a court could determine how much money Microsoft made by selling perpetual licenses that turned out to be a lie, add interest, add a 50% penalty, and require Microsoft to pay all of that into a trust to be collected by any customers harmed. The point would not be so much to help the customers but…
You can do class action litigation, but that takes years and the lawyers collect 30-50% of any settlement. The economics for customers don't make sense.
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#74I believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0] There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days. Buying a single…
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Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
...on a Mac?
Yeah that makes no sense. Those AI are not running macOS instances to make you a docx. If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.
Microsoft's own different versions of Office can't always reliably read/write docx between them.
Is a layer of LLM going to make this better or worse? Could you train a model to be very good at it?
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#76Well, technically they never said the products would continue to function with the same functionality. But also this is Micro$oft, and I would've thought people would know by now that do only what's in their own interest.
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it me or are people too eager to "one track mind" everything into AI? If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft, even in a world without AI.
"literally no one would be surprised" Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility. For the proposition that once you have purchased one of their products, you didn't have to maintain any further relationship with the company. This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.
> Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility
And for reselling you the same office suite every couple of years.
(Full disclosure, I worked there in the 2000s... So if anything I should be biased the other way.)
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you define a single machine?
The answer is far more comprehensive than I imagined. "...run one instance of the software on your device (the licensed device), for use by one person at a time... In this agreement, “device” means a local hardware system (whether physical or virtual) with an internal storage device capable of running the software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a device. For purposes of this agreement, “device” do…
Yeah if you don’t license Office correctly for an RDS server, you’d by contract be liable for a license for each user and device used to access the server.
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO it would be better if there was a general mechanism to prevent profiting from corrupt business practices. For example, a court could determine how much money Microsoft made by selling perpetual licenses that turned out to be a lie, add interest, add a 50% penalty, and require Microsoft to pay all of that into a trust to be collected by any customers harmed. The point would not be so much to help the customers but…
The general mechanism is lawsuits; in this case class action lawsuits.
And this mechanism is pretty ineffective.
Class action lawsuits usually end up with settlements where the offender pays much less than the harm they caused, and those harmed get almost nothing. Even if it does go all the way to a court verdict, the sentence is usually insufficient. And the process is long and expensive.
I don't really know what the solution is, but the current system clearly isn't working. And I don't think it was really designed for the scale of mega corporations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers.
Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
#80When did "hate the customer" become a thing?
When Google beat their antitrust suit