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 SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on.
Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible.
Take a look at the full feature list to get an idea of what's included: https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...
And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...
If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product.
Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.
like this is YC sponsored site, there is a tons of SaaS for niche toolkit that people sold,shares etc
and now all of sudden they hate it when other people doing the same thing they do
not believe it???? just click past button and its shows top 50 of HN upvoted thread for yesterday and its shows multiple of SaaS product or SaaS clothed OpenSource in some form or another
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.
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, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.
And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
> 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".
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.
Or SoftMaker ([1], [2]) with their product SoftMaker Office ([3], [4]).
[1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker
> 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 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?
500 million users. Just because you haven't heard it doesn't mean an alternative doesn't exist.
If you want a true and good alternative, I'd recommend ONLYOFFICE[1].
While more efficient in some areas, it's missing a lot of quality of life tools plus legal/compliance/security tooling.
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 increase the prices ten-fold?
Decision in Enterprise organizations are not done by the end user and non of your options, not even Google Docs, offers the equality of features.
M365 is far more than just Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams (apart from some apps depending on the M365 tier you are in like Access, Project, Visio etc.), you buy a whole workspace. Users can seamlessly share and work together on documents, not only in their organization but also with others. It's easy to process information from one app to the other etc.
Yes, Google Docs might be the closest thing when it comes to features (but no match), however, looking at local restrictions and laws, Microsoft is one of the few companies that can host you M365 solution in an environment that, for example, matches european laws.
And that is the big problem, there are no alternatives for companies that are already on M365 and using the features of it.
But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives.
How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking work? How does audit work? And that's just the surface.
Needs for large enterprises, where you cannot just have John from HR make a new account for the new hire, are often not met by the opensource world.
The point isn't that but the fact that like a normal user, a normal business don't want to have to tinker with low level components to get the functionality they want. They desire to pay and get a working piece of infrastructure with low hassle (tho i get saying active directory being low hassle is weird).
A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits.
And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?
Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades.
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.
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.
There are alternatives but when you have bought into the full ecosystem of MS, it will take a lot of work to move.
(Full disclosure: I work with both Linux and Windows at a small company where Office means what you mean with office. They are all using libreoffice but call it office)
Sharepoint, onedrive, teams. Everything is integrated and collaborating is trivial. You can’t replicate that with open source.
> Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades.
That explains it I suppose.
and thats the problem, the fair comparison would be like You replace AWS with hetzner vps
I've never used it but apparently it comes with ingame purchases.
Business, sure, but there are millions of consumers who exclusively use Google Docs, iWork, or other Office alternatives.
Things can be done in such ways that there is nothing visibly incompatible (ie scripting behind some forms), you can always just print and fill the document if needed, and anyway most documents are static pdfs with optional plus for filling some fields in computer.
Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
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.
> not economical viable
I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
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.
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 improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.
Cross-platform compatibility is trivial with modern tooling IMO.
And the GP is right in that the more moronic stuff people do, the harder it gets for them to no longer do that and somehow extract all their data into usable and useful form. Microsoft will happily go on making bad products, if that keeps its users prisoners.
It's just extremely complicated to transition between the two. So Google is more popular with newer companies, since it's a bit more seamless being cloud-native, whereas Microsoft has inertia with companies that have been around longer.
I guess there's a strong opportunity for someone to build a Linux distro that bundles all of it for you in such a way you could use it OOTB for a company.
Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.
The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint.
Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.
Imagine organizing a meal out for 5 people. Easy. Despite the vegan, gluten free, kosher, high protein, lactose intolerant, no-fish, only fish, carb free dietary requirements there are lots of places to choose from. You can even order from 5 places and get 5 meals delivered.
Now do that for 50. Or 500. Or 50 000. Sooner or later you start going to buffets. Sooner or later the food becomes very bland.
You judge your software purchase for yourself based on features and moral principles and likely price.
Business doesn't really care about features. It does care about suppliers. It does care about the reliability of the supply chain. It doesn't care about price (at least not at the Windows / Office price point.)
I've been a supplier to corporates. The paperwork (and commitment) is substantial. Insurances, liabilities, support levels, release procedures, accountability,,,, it goes on for days.
The moat MS has, has nothing to do with software. Which is why that "better software" fails - because it is optimizing for one kind of "better" and business defines "better" another way.
And no, nothing is "replaced easily" in the enterprise space. When 10000 people, scattered over 1000 locations, get all-new software, nothing about that is easy.
Is there? Maybe Google docs.
It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
Tell this to all office alternative lmao
I tried them all and all they do is sucks, even the strongest competitor is (google docs,sheet) feels "lacking"
A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember.
Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications.
It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.
Companies that had a successful niche, like Lotus, failed to keep up.
On Microsoft admin/entra/management webpages each weblink does something completely different, yet it provides a very convenient interface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_365_applicat...
It looks like a lot of the project planning SAAS are trying to take the crown too.
It’s just strange that Google seemingly gave up.
Google Workspace is extremely popular with new features coming out constantly, used by tons of corporations.
Is it just not on your radar or something?
Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?
.. 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.
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.
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".
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)
At the moment you can more or less, I suppose, trust that Microsoft, Google and Apple are not actively spying for the newly anti-European goals of a protofascist federal government, but I am not sure that trust should be extended to cloud service providers more generally, let alone social media companies.
Europe has maybe two years to find a new level of technology independence and it cannot wait.
Trump's government has made it text, not just subtext, that they intend to interfere with further European integration (which is also — coincidentally or not — Russia's top foreign policy goal).
The EU should assume that this is a declaration of cold war and act accordingly:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald...
There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed or was included in M365, and used PowerPoint as an everything-is-a-hammer crutch, and have now gotten jobs at Microsoft and are sticking with it.
Also, as far as I can tell, Publisher is the only application where the color-picker includes Pantone colors which is a must for professional poster production. I assume Microsoft is paying a licensing fee for this, and I wonder if they'll remember to cancel it.
Perhaps Affinity can eat their lunch and release a word-processor.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-publish...
For a very long time Publisher was marketed to home users who want to do some simple DTP work, and not to businesses. This is a very different audience than businesses.
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].
In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home.
1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions).
2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc.
I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death).
There isn't because any serious print shop will laugh you out the door if you come to them with a Publisher file.
Publisher is fine for home/office printing, and you will probably get away with it at your local corner shop that does digital printing on a Xerox box in the back of the shop.
But if you're sending stuff off to the big-boys you will suddenly find yourself needing to adhere to artwork preflight settings, colour profiles, PDF and TAC specs.
Not only will the printer give you validation settings files you can load into Acrobat and Indesign, but if there are issues, the printer's preflight team will be more willing (and able !) to help you if you are using industry-standard tools.
You say this like customers don't show up with a PowerPoint file.
I never really thought about it, but it is kind of odd that the same community that loves using LaTeX for document formatting and typesetting research papers is also using PowerPoint as a desktop publishing substitute.
The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there.
It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?
Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).
It can all be done in Word too, but most people I've seen using Word don't bother even setting image placement for each image or change margins. They just stick with what's default.
I actually agree with you that a whole mode is an overkill, but I think whatever they put in they'd have to market pretty well so users would consider it at all. So it also makes sense to me they'd say "use PowerPoint instead" as it is what many are already doing.
There appear to be templates for this in Powerpoint
In truth, I haven't tried this in Word either, although it appears to be possible in page setup. Maybe I just stopped using Publisher when I started getting duplex printers. Or even stopped needing silly layouts for school projects.
Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.
For most it didn't. The non 365 Office came in 3 tiers Student, business, and enterprise. Publisher only came with enterprise.
Of the last two times I had to make a flyer, one of the two I pulled up PowerPoint to accomplish. It's not a completely outlandish direction. They should add a Publisher mode that transforms the interface for print document design.
"Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?" "I believe he did."
I mean, Powerpoint, really? That app should’ve been gone a long time.
And I always found those memes about photos moving around your text annoying, because that it literally what you want when making a document (you know, what Word is designed for) (but you can just change the behaviour if you want a different layout anyway).
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.
It would be great if LibreOffice had a spurt of speed-ups. Kind what the browser wars also competed fiercely about.
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 changes in realtime. You used to be able to do this on-prem but that product (Office Online Server) got killed. I wonder why.
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.
SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".
I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).
I got a license to Moho from a Humble Bundle like a year ago, and I think Toonz is open source nowadays, all in addition to the ToonBoom copy I have so I probably don't need the real Adobe Animate anymore.
Maybe you got in before they enshittified too :)?
Glad I snagged it when I did (though admittedly it was probably a bad impulse purchase since I don't really animate much anymore).
Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
Not that I want to encourage people to keep using Microsoft products.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.
I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.
running a VM just for occasional office use is annoying to deal with
edit: activation is probs the main issue
In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete.
Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.
And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.
This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.
> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
There's no substance to this comment. It's pure speculation. If you actually want to look at evidence, look at the recent news that Microsoft has cut AI sales targets in half.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
Ironic that you posted this as a comment on HN.
It’s not ironic at all. Posting here was deliberate to highlight the bubble that happens here for consumer products. This comment section has a lot of people evaluating these price hikes as if they were targeted at HN individual users, not for a product targeted at a different audiences and corporate subscriptions.
Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market.
Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
As for AI demand: If you don’t think AI is in demand, you haven’t been looking at the explosive adoption of AI tools from ChatGPT to Sora (consistently high on app charts) by consumers. These products are in high demand, though you’d never know if it your only perspective was through upvoted HN stories and comments.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, we can be out of touch a lot of the time, but I kind of hate that this has become the "smoking gun" to dismiss comments on Hacker News. Yes, one person was wrong about Dropbox and said that they could just use an FTP server. Yes, people on here agreed with that person. Yes, sometimes our ability to do things low level blinds us to the fact that the majority of people can't or simply don't want to.
That said, most of the negative feedback people get for these things is actually good feedback, and most of the time when people say a project can be accomplished by doing XYZ, that's usually a valid point. Technical people can absolutely be out of touch (and I'm probably worse than average about it), but that doesn't automatically mean that a comment on HN is invalid or useless.
While saying "no one wants" the AI features might be a bit of hyperbole, I don't think it's super out of touch, and this is evidenced by the fact that a lot of the VC money for AI ventures is drying up. AI is neat and here to stay, but I think a large chunk of society is coming to terms with the fact that it's not nearly as cool as it was promised to us, and getting a little annoyed with how much AI crap is being thrown at us. YouTube is getting filled with low-effort AI video and AI voice and AI script bullshit, the average web page is turning a tinge of yellow from all the AI generated images that seem to be all over the place, searching is getting almost as bad as it was in 2005 when "SEO" became a thing because of all the AI generated blogs designed to steal clicks. None of this stuff is relegated to the technical crowd, this is stuff even normies have to deal with.
And within the scope of HN, I'm sure all of us are getting a little tired of having to review pull requests with huge chunks of clearly-AI-generated code that the writer doesn't really and are large enough to not be realistically reviewable with a lot of shitty, low-effort code.
Yeah, the demand is there, but I have a hard time believing nontechnical people are clamoring for Copilot, they likely don't even know such a thing exists. The market is insane right now.
So they had used ChatGPT enough to recognize that you were using a different tool?
I don’t see this as contradicting anything. Even the nontechnical people in your life are familiar with these tools because they’re using them.
There are alternatives for consumers but enterprise isn't going to screw around with those.
Which customers? Some enterprise customers want AI, others restrict its use. Other want integration with something other than Copilot.
So a 16% hike when current US inflation is 3-4%?
When was the last price hike? Looking at historical inflation and working backwards, you only need to start at around late 2021 to get 16% cumulative inflation. In other words if they didn't raise their prices for 4 years, they'd be at par with inflation.
edit: another commenter mentioned the last price hike was around 4 years ago, so it's indeed in line with inflation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192356
All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
1) Will they budge on renewal rates?
2) Does an alternative vendor exist?
3) Is the increase reasonable compared to the cost of switching to an alternative?
4) Do we anticipate future price increases, and if so, how can we prepare ourselves to consider a switch in the future?
Don't ask me, ask the person who posed the question of inflation in the first place. That said...
>All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way. Inflation affects everything in the economy, so a company that doesn't raise prices in line with it is losing money. Even SaaS businesses with low marginal costs aren't exempt, because they still need to pay salaries for developers and support staff, both of which roughly track inflation. Therefore if business see price hikes that raise with inflation, they can assume that competitors will raise prices as well, and it's not going to be worth switching unless they're already on the fence for some other reason.
Only if you assert that all prices move together at the same velocity.
It's usually a reasonable thing to assert, when the economy isn't in a complete revolution. And it's a really bad premise right now.
No business is really going to care about $1.00/user, especially when it costs hundreds of dollars per user (or thousands) to migrate entirely away from the Microsoft ecosystem.
Or that this was for business accounts that were already cheap? $1/seat isn’t going to cause a mass migration off the platform.
Or that some of the price hikes were 0%?
Fixating on this lowest price increase is deliberately misleading.
You would also have to go back and calculate price increases over time to compare against inflation over time?
The average australian customer managed to get angry enough that the ACCC is working to force a slop free variant and a refund for everyone dark patterned into upgrading.
You're completely right about this. But how does the Venn diagram look for features between different Office versions and for customer needs? Another commenter here said that Office 98 is good enough for most users, and I have to agree.
What reason is there today for somebody to upgrade from a 10 or 15 year old version of Office? Is Copilot it?
I've managed a very information-intensive career so far without using MS Office. Apple's iWork software is perfectly fine. And I'm not avoiding Office out of any principle. If I needed or wanted it, I'd be happy to pay for it.
Collaborative editing
Except there are not really any competitors if you look at the whole package.
A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange.
The fact you get the big-four (Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint) thrown in is really just icing on the cake.
That's a negative.
I'm seeing a very common pattern of Google Workspace + Google Meet, Zoom seats for people who need to remotely control computers, and then Slack or ones of its competitors for chat.
- Its one package
- All the non-tech users already know Microsoft
- Most IT techies will be VERY familiar with Microsoft
- If you are migrating from on-Prem then it is highly likely you've got Exchange on-prem.
Look, I'm the last person to defend Microsoft. But if you are a Microsoft shop then it does, sadly, make a lot of sense to take a Microsoft sub.
There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.
There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.
But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.
But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.
But where will the next generation be shifted to?
Launched to Europe after Canada? Then launched into Space?
It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.
That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.
If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smaller orgs it might be easier, but those don't pay Microsoft as much anyways.
From a user point of view, there are tools that have similar features, some even better features. G-suite is the only platform i know of that unifies all the office productivity products like 365 does. But neither G-suite nor any other platform can be managed/policed as well as 365. At the end of the day, will Google behave any better than Microsoft anyways (cost or otherwise)? And it isn't just policing and management but securing all that precious data in there, Microsoft might not be great but lots of tech-debt has gone into securing it within that platform. A migration would be costly, justifying it with cost savings alone might be difficult.
At least in my workplace, people do their best to avoid using sharepoint and onedrive anyway.
I can see being resistant to change, haven't had issues with it (and have benefitted from the auto save quite a lot).
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 more minor ways, such as causing path confusion with some applications.
The benefits, at least where I work, are pretty minimal. So, on the whole, people tend to keep their documents in unsynced folders. The only people I've talked to here that have anything positive to say about it are managers.
I've had some irritations with it, but overall having versioning has been a much bigger benefit than the hassle.
What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?
Thanks
How people in companies really need the features of Word, Excel and PowerPoint?
I often see people using space to right align a date, the pros use tabs.
For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
In case you aren't aware, when they try to sneak Copilot onto your plan you can get rid of it by going to your plan management page and canceling. One of the offers they should offer to try to get you to stay is your old plan without Copilot.
Isn’t that only perpetual as long as the activation servers are up?
It has nothing to do with existing files/compatibility. Excel is unparalleled.
This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.
It's fine if you have a few formulas. As soon as you're busting out macros it's time to sunset the workbook and make an application. There's a lot of God Excel workbooks sitting around on share drives with no audibility or quality control.
But given that Excel is the second-best tool for everything, world runs on it.
And when you try to build systems to replace Excel for a specific task, you quickly learn how extremely powerful Excel is and how hard is to replace it and add value that customers would care about.
But many end users prefer dealing with bugs than with inflexible software that doesn’t understand all the different ways how real world is messy and hard to model.
I hate using Excel. But I 100% understand why world runs on it.
If you listed out all the things that Excel can do, we might find that the alternative is at 80% or so (just a number), with some additional things that Excel can't do. That 80% could be good enough to switch. It should not be looked at as "all or nothing", especially for every person or business.
But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
When there is a significant difference, it needs to be shown what the equivalent is in the alternative. The jump can be a bit mitigated by education or information, but usually by only so much, where it's still seen as attractive.
But once you get used to those differences, (also, knowing that there are a handful of themes that can shorten the difference significantly) then it becomes a non-issue after less than 10 hours of use.
Speak for yourself. I see that LibreOffice's default UI is still a normal WIMP UI and this is a plus for me. I hated when MS Office switched to the ribbon in Office 2007.
"So you want to insert a row in a table? Great, just click on Table > Insert > Row... Oh well. Nevermind, just show me your screen and I'll hunt the functionality in that stupid ribbon."
We don't need less, but more, Office programs that respect GUI UI conventions.
It's self-hostable (and the community version is FOSS I think), and really useful in a way I find better than just a spreadsheet.
It's no good for importing complex excel things, but I've found it very useful for new work.
There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.
I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...
Looks like there was finally a OpenOffice release recently but that was after years of people complaining of security vulnerabilities not fixed in the release version.
Agreed that their actual products seem to work fine for almost everyone.
That was the moment I booted into windows for the first time in 4 months. I started up Power Point and sure enough SVGs are no problem.
2B row limit, connected, eliminates the Excel security risk because it's hosted.
Nobody offers what Microsoft bundles here. From editors, to storage, to communication to identity to management.
And I say this as someone who hates dealing with Microsoft and their products.
Likely they'd charge more for it.
If used properly.
So, like, was that satire? I got a good laugh out of "Multiplayer PowerPoint" either way.
It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.
But what about the impact of increased productivity when not having to deal with the garbage that are New Teams and New Outlook? The employees would start doing more in lesser time and the companies could potentially make more profits too. Why would they want that if they could just be locked in with Microsoft month-on-month? /s
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
Any gotchas to be aware of with OnlyOffice?
There are parts that are not released under a Free Software license but that's unclear from their marketing-communication. #openWashing
https://www.collaboraonline.com/comparing-collabora-with-onl...
Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.
For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.
I agree and you'd be surprised at the response when I showed some of them how to do it in python numpy.
I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Document Foundation so that it can get better, but it moves very slowly.
This might be true. But most Excel users just use the basics and would be well served to switching to a Free Software alternative such as LibreOffice Calc. Which, is also capable to be used in advanced contexts; although for those cases it is different than Excel, admittedly.
I think most of the excuses saying why people don't switch to Excel alternatives are simply coverups for inertia. I understand that; getting out of the comfort zone is difficult. But it's not impossible.
Turns out close to 100% of the spreadsheet users out there don't care about that. It's unnerving and absurd, and IMO, what is even the point of all the effort of entering your data and working it if you don't care about the result being correct? But that's how the world is.
LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.
Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.
Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.
And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.
For an org where individual users aren't technical I'd never try to get by w/o Microsoft Office. The assumption by all large orgs. that you're going to use Microsoft Office is pervasive. Even if the Free Office suites work fine tech support is always going to be mired down in compatibility issues, both real and perceived.
I deal with hundreds of API integrations involving various JSON, CSV, TSV, and XML files with mixed validity. My workflow: Notepad++ for a visual check -> Prototype everything in Excel. I give users a "visual", connect it to real data, and only then migrate the final logic to BI dashboards or databases.
Nothing else delivers results this fast. SQL, BI tools, and Python are too slow because they generally need "clean" data. Cleaning and validation take too much time there. In Excel, it's mostly just a few clicks.
PS: I spent 2 years (2022-2023) using LibreOffice Calc. I didn't touch Excel once, thinking I needed to break the habit. In the end, I did break the habit, but it was replaced by a pile of scripts and utilities because Calc couldn't do what I needed (or do it fast enough). The experience reminds me of testing Krita for 2 years (2018-2020) — I eventually returned to Adobe Photoshop (but that's another story).
PS2: About (Query + Pivot + BI). This allows you to process millions of rows (bypassing grid limitations). It also allows you to compress everything into an OLAP cube, taking up little space and working quickly with data.
- it's hard to version control/diff
- it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells
- it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git
In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess.
Not only that, software nerds are rediscovering that they can build so much in Excel. You don't need an app for everything.
>When Visicalc was released, Perez became convinced that it was the ideal user interface for his visionary product: the Functional Database. With his friend Jose Sinai formed the Sinper Corporation in early 1983 and released his initial product, TM/1 (the "TM" in TM1 stands for "Table Manager"). Sinper was purchased by Applix in 1996, which was purchased by Cognos in late 2007, which was in itself acquired mere months later by IBM.[3][2]
TM1 is widely used as a way to interface with official ledgers.
Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes
Sure, but they also use accounting software, not Excel.
> Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes Sure they do, but they use testing and typed languages etc.
The problem with Excel is comma vs dot, locales, fat fingering, out of range errors, too easy to change a cell formula by mistake etc.
Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
If the finance team suggested you have to write all of your code in C using Emacs would you be OK with that?
But to answer the question, that is where I finished. We weren't "okay with it" that the finance team insisted on a C# to Excel files in SharePoint/OneDrive via Microsoft Graph turducken. We lived with it because the finance team had enough of the metaphorical keys to the car to be deeply in the driver's seat of that project. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and deliver what the customer wants.
I know plenty of people who think they do. I know a few that cost the world economy about a trillion dollars: https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-spreadsheet-error...
My company pays for office though, and I end up having to use it to play their Sensitivy Rules games for labeling files.
PowerPoint is underrated.
For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.
You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
No, I don't think so. I either sail the high seas or subscribe for a month or two when job searching then toss it when I'm done.
But nothing beats excel or power point.
Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?
Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.
(To those wondering why not LibreOffice - I am not saying not LibreOffice; but I am not sure how well LibreOffice's model fits to e. g. having a suite of office-related software that can be employed by every government, school, university, company etc... perhaps the code base is not well-written. Do we already have the co-editing functionality online? So that I could modify the document of an elderly person and then create a .pdf file. I can do so locally of course, but I want to be able to modify that on another, approved before-hand computer. Right now I have to carry an USB stick, and then modify locally, which is also possible, but I'd much prefer in-built solutions here. This is just one example of many many more. We need an improved LibreOffice here.)
Apparently F1 and F3 are "Office 365 for Frontline Workers". F3 is kind of like Office 365 Basic, F1 is stripped down to mostly read-only access plus Microsoft Teams
If they were doubling prices or something then of course, raise the alarms. This is not that.
Is it going to break the bank and send us into a financial death spiral? Absolutely not. But, you get enough companies deciding to jack up pricing at around the same time and it comes out to a significant increase in our lights-on budget - death by a million cuts hurts just as much as Broadcom raking us over the coals with VMWare license increases.
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 customers can do if Microsoft decides to hike the prices anyhow they like.
Note: Indian Government recently adopted Zoho office suite to insulate themselves from Microsoft.
But I don't think many other governments or businesses have the guts to make such move.
I agree that it's a lot of work to build something that can render and edit their complex format, but quite a few companies have managed now.
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.
To a limited extent, for the reasons that the person you're replying to laid out.
I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files.
Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite well. Sure, Microsoft has a little bit of a leg up, but it's nothing like the monopoly they had on .doc.
Today, we expect programs to be able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. In the 90s, we truly didn't. Yes, there might be some advanced things that don't always work, but it's so different today.
India's central government didn't adopt Zoho just to insulate against Microsoft. It was done when Trump imposed a 50% tariff on imports from India. It was targeted against US IT companies in general, though the most mentioned one was Google. Zoho is an Indian company.
I had switched to Zoho about 6 months before them and it has provided a rather decent experience so far. The biggest attractions for me though, are that it's very economical and it has transactions in local currency using local payment systems. They also have a good selection of apps.
Honestly, this was a wasted opportunity for GoI. Indian domestic IT market is an untapped gold mine that they didn't promote much until recently. But better late than never, I guess.
Another relevant point here is that India is one of the countries that voted against Microsoft OOXML document format in favor of ODF at ISO. There are several central and state level government agencies that adopted ODF officially.
I'm thinking of pivoting my Bioinformatics services company to more of a "sovereign systems" provider. I build a ton of infra for a small startup, it's all Nucs and beefier systems throwing data around.
[0] https://www.kpn.com/zakelijk/grootzakelijk/modern-workplace/...
Must be for all those new useful features brought to your desktop over the last decade. Definitely not monopolistic rent-seeking. No siree.
If you or someone you love is a legal user and interested in checking out an in-development word processor built for lawyers, please consider Tritium.
It's free to download: https://tritium.legal/download or check out the web version: https://tritium.legal/preview
2026 is definitely a great time for still not considering free software since lessons have not been learned yet.
You are trashing a competitor despite having the exact same fundamental flaws.
Please be actually better, please don't lock your users in. It's still time to make the right decision.
> Please be actually better, we have too much trash proprietary software in this world.
What we're attempting :)
That's not what I'm saying. You can thrive with an open source business model. I'm working for such a company.
Falsewoods software founders still believe about free and open source software in 2026
1. That's it's 100% made unpaid, outside business despite the numerous clues that it's not
(note to whom might read this thread: I edited my previous comment to tame it and make it a bit more constructive, piker cited something that doesn't appear anymore in my comment but that I indeed wrote)
You can aim for better than "where MS is".
This could constitute a killer argument to make your solution appealing.
Google Workplace theoretically can be configured, but it doesn't cover basic stuff like information in contacts. So if ANYONE in your organization (like an outreach coordinator) adds a patient and puts notes into the contact field, it's a HIPAA violation. There is no way to effectively police that.
I wish the regulations were written such that messaging apps, office suites, etc over a certain percentage of revenue had to qualify for HIPAA by default. It's absurd how many small shops just do everything in over WhatsApp/iMessage/Gmail/iCould, etc.
Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.
I wonder how it will fit with the “Frugality” LP.
This is doubly frustrating when Word is the standard for resumes.
When I cancelled, I made it clear why I was doing it. But I doubt anyone reads the feedback we provide
I don't use much of it (just email and onedrive) and I can even drop onedrive if I need to (so just use exchange online plan 1). But if the teams-less version is not rising in price I might stick with that.
So happy for customers choosing to go all-in with Microsoft. I sincerely think that Microsoft had to pour a lot of $$$$ to IT managers across US and EU to 'lobby' them to adopt O365. I say this because two of my last contracts in France had a great wall for anything published on the Internet because RGPD/Security/Data, but magically the same people that, you better insult them than ask for a Public IP, adopted O365. Happy for all these companies, I hope they are squeezed even more.
Le me being layed off in April 2026 because the Cisco collaboration suite is phased out and the company goes all in with Teams. (I'm open to work in France)
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have maintained a business software monoculture for decades. Nobody has invested significant resources into competing products, just tiny companies and open source volunteers putting out niche alternatives. Microsoft could probably double their prices, and double the built-in advertising, and most customers would complain loudly and keep using them. Docx files, PSDs, PDF forms, etc with any complexity will only ever run properly in one corresponding proprietary application.
Then why don't they? I think it's precisely because they don't want anyone "investing significant resources into competing products"
There's a line for everyone and current prices obviously aren't too much for a majority of people, including me. I just don't stay subscribed when I'm not using it.
They keep getting away with it, and nobody has any idea when the buck will finally stop.
> And maybe they make it play a 30 second video ad once a day?
Maybe. While we're at it, I'll also add a hypothetical: what if it encrypted all my files and made me pay a ransom?
Let's actually look at what you get for your money (I'll just go by current consumer pricing since it's easy to find/understand):
Microsoft 365 Family:
$130/year
6 people, 1TB storage per person
Each person gets 5 devices for all Office apps
Higher AI usage limits than free (only primary user, not shared)
Let's try to buy this from someone else:
Google: $99/year for 2TB, shared between 6 people, but your limit is 2TB total. No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI which bumps this all up to $20/month with no additional storage. I can't actually see how much additional storage costs to make this equivalent to 1TB/person without signing up.
Apple: $420/year to get 6TB of storage shared between 6 people. iWork apps are garbage, no AI included. iCloud+ does have some side features like private relay, custom domain email, etc.
Proton Family: 3TB, $288 a year
pCloud: 10TB family lifetime plan is $1500, equivalent to about 10 years of paying for Office 365.
All this to say, tl;dr, Microsoft is actually offering one of the better deals out there especially if you want to give a significant amount of storage to each family member at a low cost.
Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)
I did try to use annual pricing with annual discounts wherever I could, some services don’t really list it explicitly.
I will admit Microsoft’s pricing doesn’t really look as good if you’re not sharing the storage, and they get demerit for not providing a free tier for most of the apps at all.
Already moved all my usage away from MS…now just need to persuade rest of fam
Microsoft increasing prices on a subscription product is an admission that their AI play is failing. The project sucks up money and yields none of the promised returns. Failure to deliver on development, failure to optimize datacenters, failure to reduce required staff in general.
The last straw, aside from the price increases, was switching my office.com landing page to copilot. It feels like a new low, even for Microsoft.
You just lost $6/mo., Microsoft. I hope it was worth it.
[also massgrave will activate Office if you are really stuck...]
It's annoying because for me the most useful parts of Office are OneNote and Publisher. OneNote being a neglected back-water app they obviously don't care about and Publisher actually being EOL in '26.
Microsoft is basically a B2B now. Their customers are those who use Team and Exchange. Those customers are locked in and with no real alternative to migrate to.
I would love to find a OneDrive replacement that works well both on Linux and Windows (and Android, iOS).
If you have absolutely nothing in your documents that you wouldn’t mind giving the FBI to read without a warrant or probable cause, it is possible you are wasting your one and only life.
A good example would be anyone in the state-legal cannabis industry. This is still a federal crime (Schedule 1!), and giving cloud providers (and thus DHS without a warrant thanks to FAA702) concrete detailed evidence of same is, from a criminal liability standpoint, the same thing as mailing the FBI photos of your meth lab with your return address on it.
But yes your point is correct.
What's current state of open-source alternatives that can work with the MS file formats?
Which kind of is on Microsoft for not fixing the situation and just carrying cruft every release. They could have a separate tool to fix/migrate to whatever modern format they are using nowadays (or to some "light" format that doesn't allow all the features 99% of users don't care about).
Their subscription could be much cheaper.
Because it isn't possible now.
Office just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. The only thing they have going for them is vendor lock-in, and that's sad.
You have to understand the basic consumer SaaA contract of the 21st century:
- We give them money and agree terms and they do things to us that we didn't ask for that they want to do
- They change the terms of the agreement to allow it, we occasionally spot their attempts to grab new rights in the process, and they back away a little as if it was just some sort of silly mistake.
- Repeat.
Of course this price hike is inevitably dragging Xbox brand into the hole long term, but those in charge of the price hikes probably expect not to be around when that happens,.
Hell, even Call of Duty somehow underperformed
What did I say?
I guess we get what we deserve after all..
Who's coming on board the self-hosted Nextcloud etc train? choo choo !
Well, the RAM prices had gone up and they need to buy more hard drives for your confidential documents, stored on OneDrive.
The only reason I still use Word is because I don't want to have to deal with random layout incompatibility issues when sharing docs with colleagues.
In general, I find Apple Pages much more pleasant to work with and by far my favorite word processor (and I have used them all extensively on Win/Mac/nix).
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 and it's ePub?
But then what's needed is an editor (on-prem server and local portable executable) that has the nice things like automatic ToC generation, foot/endnotes, track changes/document comparison, online collaboration.
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.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...