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Microsoft Will Block Desktop 'Office' Apps From 'Office 365' Services In 2020 (techradar.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Microsoft is still encouraging businesses to rent their Office software, according to TechRadar. "In a bid to further persuade users of the standalone versions of Office to shift over to a cloud subscription (Office 365), Microsoft has announced that those who made a one-off purchase of an Office product will no longer get access to the business flavours of OneDrive and Skype come the end of the decade." PC World explains that in reality this affects very few users. "If you've been saving all of your Excel spreadsheets into your OneDrive for Business cloud, you'll need to download and move them over to a personal subscription -- or pony up for Office 365, as Microsoft really wants you to do."
Microsoft is claiming that when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer. The IT security and reliability benefits and end user experiences in the apps is limited to the features shipped at a point in time. To ensure that customers are getting the most out of their Office 365 subscription, we are updating our system requirements." And in another blog post, they're almost daring people to switch to Linux. "Providing over three years advance notice for this change to Office 365 system requirements for client connectivity gives you time to review your long-term desktop strategy, budget and plan for any change to your environment."
In a follow-up comment, Microsoft's Alistair Speirs explained that "There is still an option to get monthly desktop updates, but we are changing the 3x a year update channel to be 2x a year to align closer to Windows 10 update model. We are trying to strike the right balance between agile, ship-when-ready updates and enterprise needs of predictability, reliability and advanced notice to validate and prepare."
Microsoft is claiming that when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer. The IT security and reliability benefits and end user experiences in the apps is limited to the features shipped at a point in time. To ensure that customers are getting the most out of their Office 365 subscription, we are updating our system requirements." And in another blog post, they're almost daring people to switch to Linux. "Providing over three years advance notice for this change to Office 365 system requirements for client connectivity gives you time to review your long-term desktop strategy, budget and plan for any change to your environment."
In a follow-up comment, Microsoft's Alistair Speirs explained that "There is still an option to get monthly desktop updates, but we are changing the 3x a year update channel to be 2x a year to align closer to Windows 10 update model. We are trying to strike the right balance between agile, ship-when-ready updates and enterprise needs of predictability, reliability and advanced notice to validate and prepare."
Why? If you have a desktop version of Office that you've already purchased you already have an office suite. It's the cloud storage you need to switch. Google Drive or Dropbox will happily take your money and cost a lot less than 365 to boot. Well, Google drive will, Dropbox seems to have missed the whole "I need more storage than the free version but don't want to pay $100 a year for this crap when I won't use 90% of it" boat...
You're forgetting the cost of the workstation license, plus the license to allow the workstation to communicate with the server. Then there's the exchange licenses and the Outlook licenses... Then the license to allow the client and sever to communicate. Follow that up with av licenses, oh, don't forget the 'advanced' CALs for a lot of exchange features. Then there are support incident costs because windows admins are incompetent. Oh, and time to buy new hardware because MS is preventing you from getting updates unless you buy a new version of Windows or a new PC with a new version of Windows. Surprise, it's time to buy new CALs again. Time to drive a dump truck full of gold bricks up to the Redmond campus again.
This is about Microsoft's non-subscription version of Office being able to access the corporate version of OneDrive, so LibreOffice won't help here.
It'd be interesting to see the FOSS community come up with an equivalent to OneDrive (if we could somehow do it without needing a central server, that'd be a major step forward) but a FOSS office suite isn't going to help.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If all docs were made with Libre Office we'd have less compatibility problems (usually problems arise when MS office stuff is read in anything else ; not the opposite). Users need to change their habits.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The problem is "that thing" is the generic stand-alone office suite of the nineties. Sans Outlook. Which is not what you are looking for if you are shopping around for alternatives to the corporate editions of Office365.
This arrogance will be all people need to make them figure out Office's extra features aren't worth paying for. Libreoffice and AbiWord offer what 99% of people actually use.
One thing I've learned over the years is that Slashdot commenters are generally not good at reacting to abuse. Slashdot commenters make excuses, or react to abuse weakly.
I see the last 20 years have done nothing to dampen your idealism, good for you but maybe an ounce of reality wouldn't hurt? Back then your data was local, you had the executable and the only thing you didn't have was the source code to inspect it. Even though things like email went from your server to their server instead of peer to peer, things were pretty distributed and decentralized. Having access to the source code was mostly about being able to fix and extend it, not that it did something nasty.
Not only have consumers ignored open source solutions, they've gone totally the other way. Much of their data lives in the cloud, where they have no control of what's done with it. They use huge, centralized services like Facebook that collects a ton of data. Auto-updating devices download and install new executable code all the time and often rely on online servers. People don't care that they're being tracked and in many cases even accuse those who object of having something to hide. They sign away all rights in mile-long EULAs without thought.
We've ranted. We've raged. We've raised the banners and tried to proclaim YotLD many times. XPs online activation in 2001. Slammer & friends in 2003. Vista in 2006. "Trusted Computing" sometime late 2000s. Windows 8 in 2012. Windows 10 in 2015. Stealth telemetry in all VS apps in 2016. I'm sure there's many more things I've forgotten. I'm sure there's bad things about Apple, Google, Adobe and many others. We've raged out. It's like "OMG OMG Microsoft is... wait, what's the point? Why is anyone going to listen now, when they never have in the past?"
They earn billions of dollars that way. And in between screwing us over they sometime make pretty good software, so yeah... maybe open source is more efficient but one idealist versus a hundred paid developers is unfair teams. So I run Win7 and I got an iPhone. Should it have been Linux and a rooted Android phone? Maybe. But like I said, raged out. If I can't even stand the hassle myself, it's pretty hard to ask anyone else to fight a fight I feel is pretty hopeless. Pretty sure I'm not the only disillusioned ex-revolutionary here.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Volume licensing for Office 365 is a lot cheaper per seat than simply multiplying the list price by number of employees. It also has a much simpler licensing model than previous Microsoft volume licensing, which makes compliance easier (you get all of the desktop apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android included). The latter point alone is worth it to a lot of big companies.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Use LibreOffice. It's better
No it's not. It's ok to avoid MS-Office if you don't want the lock-in and the constant scheming, but LibreOffice is not better. It's not even close.
Microsoft is terrible at a lot of things, but Office is excellent. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; they're all good products that are second to none. The online version though is awful, especially Outlook. For that Google has better products. Which is kind of funny since Microsoft is trying to push people to the cloud.
lucm, indeed.