For the First Time, Microsoft Got More Revenue From Office 365 Subscriptions Than From Traditional Office Software Licensing (axios.com)

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios: Shares of Microsoft hit record territory in after-hours trading on Thursday, topping $75 a share, after the software giant's better-than-expected financial results. As has been the case for the last several quarters, strength in Microsoft's cloud business, including Office 365 and Windows Azure, was the key to the company's growth. Of note, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood told analysts that, for the first time, Microsoft got more revenue from Office 365 subscriptions than from traditional Office software licensing. Why it matters: Microsoft has shown an ability to grow its business even as the PC market has stalled, reflecting moves the company made in the cloud both since Satya Nadella took over as CEO as well as some that were in place before he took over the top spot.

Comments

Vendor lock-in stick

[Tablizer]

Because they practically force MS-Cloud down your throat. They know you need MS-Office to be compatible with all your existing MS documents, yet you can't go to another vendor if you want reasonable desktop pricing.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, look on the bright side; LibreOffice and such have been seeing massive increases in support and userbases in the past few years.
I'm also seeing businesses trying out Ubuntu and such, and saying more positive things about it than Windows 10, which is horrible for Microsoft.
The subscription and cloud shit is getting out of hand and businesses are starting to get fed up of seeing lists of 50 fucking names that they need to pay
monthly or such for what should be trivial shit which happens to have non-subscription alternatives just waiting to be supported.
It's the same as gamers, 2 multiplayer games on subscription ok, 3 tolerable, more than 3 = "get the fuck out, I ain't a charity company",
yet over 50 individual titles except subscription payment with more and more saturating. The system is haywire.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft will make Windows 10 monthly rental only?

Re: Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that that list of companies we need to pay subscription fees to needs to go down dramatically. Unfortunately the ones we will probably we doubt will be the smaller players as we consolidate our subscription spend around vendors like Microsoft. This is liable to drive more dollars into their pocket rather than fewer.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they practically force MS-Cloud down your throat. They know you need MS-Office to be compatible with all your existing MS documents, yet you can't go to another vendor if you want reasonable desktop pricing.

Educational institutions (colleges and universities) force their students (customers) to use Microsoft Office 365 as part of their tuition and other fees each year. In the US alone there are over 10 million students who have paid subscriptions through their college or university.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to buy MS Office from not Microsoft?

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing is, most old Word files do have compatibility problems in the newest Word versions.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[unixisc]

Because they practically force MS-Cloud down your throat. They know you need MS-Office to be compatible with all your existing MS documents, yet you can't go to another vendor if you want reasonable desktop pricing.

No, they don't. One still has the option of using their normal Office software.

Two advantages of the subscription model, the way they've designed it:

- Everytime there is a change to the software version, like say Office 2013 to 2016, under a subscription model, one will automatically get the newer version, w/o having to buy a new license of the software. Upgrade rights are built in. If one doesn't want that, yeah, go w/ the traditional box.

- Office 365 comes w/ up to 5 OneDrive accounts of 1TB each, each associated w/ an Outlook.com affiliated account (outlook.com, live.com, hotmail.com) which makes backups handy

However, one is still at liberty to not buy the subscription version

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[unixisc]

I happen to prefer Calligra to LibreOffice, but one thing I'd like to know: how is LibreOffice's spreadsheet, presentation & database (Access-like) software? From everything I've heard, only Word is up to par, but the other things in the package are sadly wanting

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[jez9999]

I use LibreOffice Calc all the time, works fine for me. Presentation software I never use. If you want a database, get a real one like Postgres. Access is shit.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[geoskd]

From everything I've heard, only Word is up to par, but the other things in the package are sadly wanting

You, sir, have been misled. For almost everything, LibreOffice is perfectly sufficient. The one glaring exception is excel vs calc. In that one area, Microsoft has a clear advantage because of the huge investment companies made in VBA based spreadsheets. Long term, this may be the only thing that keeps Microsoft products afloat as they piss off their user base as fast as they can invent new ways of doing it. Sooner or later, these companies will figure out that the cost of re-writing VBA scripts in something more universal plus the cost of a maintenance contract for an entire Linux stack is less than the cost of the windows stack. As that realization happens, slowly Microsoft shops will convert. It wont happen overnight, but Microsoft shops are at a cost structure disadvantage to non-MS shops already, and that will only get worse as the alternative products get more and more mature and the cost of maintenance drops.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Only after they've bolted the door shut on installing other OS's and pushed through legislation to make trying to get past it illegal, so you literally have no choice but Microsoft-based software on the cheap side of $5000 or more.

Microsoft wants to both own and control your computer and your data, and only let you do what they approve of with it. They just want you to pay for all costs associated with it.

Re: Vendor lock-in stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Equation evaluation on Libreoffice is also significantly slower, even ignoring VBA scripts. It just can't handle large sheets with deep update cascades as well.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[ArmoredDragon]

- Everytime there is a change to the software version, like say Office 2013 to 2016, under a subscription model, one will automatically get the newer version, w/o having to buy a new license of the software. Upgrade rights are built in. If one doesn't want that, yeah, go w/ the traditional box.

They already provided that before with software assurance.

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[unixisc]

Not exactly. If I bought an Office 2013 standard, I didn't automatically get an Office 2016 unless I separately purchased it. Granted, w/ the 365, I keep paying, but I do have the choice of upgrading or not w/ that one

Re:Vendor lock-in stick

[ArmoredDragon]

No but if you were a business buying Office and you wanted perpetual upgrades, you just had to buy it through SA, so you could already get that feature if you wanted it.

Absolutely baffling

[Weaselmancer]

98% of the people who use office simply type letters and notes, maybe make a simple spreadsheet or two. Openoffice is entirely up to the task.

I really have to give Microsoft credit, figuring out a way to make people pay rent on something as simple as a word processor.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Only indefinite monthly reoccurring expenses for appy subscriptions can type a few letters for documents and numbers in a spreadsheet and app app, unlike free perpetual use luddite software like open and libre office.

Apps!

Re:Absolutely baffling

[vux984]

98% of the people who use office simply type letters and notes, maybe make a simple spreadsheet or two. Openoffice is entirely up to the task.

The issue is that 98% of people who use office exchange documents with the other 2%.

The other issue is that office 365 includes outlook, which open office does NOT match in any capacity. And the subscription includes a decent mailbox, with alll the bells and whistles - webmail/calendar/contact
  mobile sync, windows active directory integration, etc... its a hell of a lot more than 'renting a word processor'.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Or .. people actually want and choose to use Microsoft products

Nah, we'll go with your version.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Kjella]

It's a bit of a cascading network effect. Some people at work use the advanced features of MS Office or interchange documents with other businesses that use MS Office and the people they hire are more likely to have used MS Office, thus the workplace standardizes on MS Office. Since people use MS Office at work, it's easier to get MS Office at home because everything is in the same place and they can apply any free practice/training they got at work.

You might think it would be a trivial effort to switch or use both because you understand the abstract concepts... but most people aren't there. The big blue e is the Internet, the Internet is the big blue e. I'm occasionally there about other things I don't care much about, I know how this product works and it gets the job done so... even though I know it might not be the only or best tool for the job. Mental effort isn't an infinite resource, sometimes you just don't care enough to bother.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[CastrTroy]

While you may be right, maybe most people just think it's a better model for paying for software. I can get Office for my entire family (up to 5 people) for only $100 a year. Considering how much this would have cost with the old 1 Licence = 1 Computer method of pricing, it's actually much more cost effective to just pay $100 a year and always have your software up to date.

Businesses also get a pretty good deal at about $10-$15 a month depending on the extras that you want, but even at $10 a month, you get the full office suite.

It may not be the best deal in every situation, but I bet if you did a cost analysis, you would find that it's actually cheaper to pay a subscription, provided you always wanted the newest version. Always having the newest version does come with a lot of benefits.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

98% of the people who use office simply type letters and notes, maybe make a simple spreadsheet or two. Openoffice is entirely up to the task.

I really have to give Microsoft credit, figuring out a way to make people pay rent on something as simple as a word processor.

Openoffice is unfortunately a pretty dead project and should probably not be touched or recommended to anyone who do not know what they are doing.
Instead, go with LibreOffice (a fork of Openoffice) that is maintained and have a good amount of developers behind it.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[aaarrrgggh]

Outlook. Without that, we could switch reasonably easily.

Problem for MS is they botched up with the recent update and our users are pissed.

Personally, I could go either way. The subscription cost is lower than the upkeep cost of stand-alone installs, as end users can be 90% responsible for it. But, we have GoogleDocs included with our email subscription so... something might need to give.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[MangoCats]

And if you "need the Cloud" Google Docs, for 10+ years, outperforming Office 365 even today.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[KingMotley]

If all you want is a simple word processor, then use WordPad. It's free and has come with every version of windows since Windows 95 I believe.

Unless of course, you really don't want just a simple word processor, then you need to look for something more advanced like Word.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

98% of the people who use office simply type letters and notes, maybe make a simple spreadsheet or two. Openoffice is entirely up to the task.

I really have to give Microsoft credit, figuring out a way to make people pay rent on something as simple as a word processor.

Dear OpenOffice / Libreoffice team,

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make .docx the default file format!

The default .odf format is the #1 reason I've seen non-geeks give up and go back to Microsoft.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[rahvin112]

It's the business licensing. If your licensing more than a few seats you have to buy the enterprise license and Microsoft forced everyone with an enterprise license to upgrade. Our IT was sending out emails telling everyone to upgrade because of it.

IMO it's not a legitimate metric when you force every existing business license to upgrade.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[MangoCats]

Sorry, I have (been forced to) used Office and recently Office 365 - they are no prize whatsoever. 3+ years ago I worked at a shop that used Google's office suite, it works better, faster and more reliably. I haven't used "local" POP3 mail clients for over a decade, but when I did, Thunderbird and Eudora ran flaming rings around Office.

The only reason I see to prefer Office to any other mail and calendaring solutions is because it's integrated into the company directory, and if the company would divorce its personnel directory from office, that advantage would disappear too.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Oswald McWeany]

I really have to give Microsoft credit, figuring out a way to make people pay rent on something as simple as a word processor.

It's not just Microsoft though. Adobe does it too for their products, and others do too. They're all figuring out they can charge you many times the price of the software by getting you on a subscription. I always avoid subscriptions in general.

Music is the same way. How many hundreds of dollars are being thrown away by people on things like Spotify? Companies aren't stupid. They know if they can get you paying for the same product every month they make more money than just charging you once and most consumers don't even realize they are being had.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[MangoCats]

I talked with an engineer in ~2005 who "wanted to try Linux" - he asked how he would do things like Word, Excel (Open Office) Photoshop (GIMP), Internet Explorer (Firefox), etc. in Linux. I told him about the equivalent software, his response:

"You mean I'd have to learn new names and icons for the programs? I don't think I'm up for that much effort..."

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to out yourself as a child who's never actually worked in any kind of enterprise environment.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That sounds pretty harsh. What exactly do "have to buy" and "force to upgrade" mean here?

Re:Absolutely baffling

[MangoCats]

It is a lower pain threshold way of paying, but ultimately quite costly, especially compared to using FOSS.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Der Huhn Teufel]

While I agree that for simple use Open Office is certainly up to the task, it's become so filled with bloat and poorly optimized code that it's extremely slow to load regardless of machine. Their file translation could also use some work, as attempting to load an OO file saved as a word document can lead to some very funky documents.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Dunbal]

upgrade every year or two

Something absolutely unnecessary nowadays for 99.9% of the user base. Back when tech was young - hell yeah, you needed to upgrade constantly or you'd miss that critical new functionality. Now every few years brings marginal increments in "features" and very little new. Unless we're talking about that radical decision of making ALL THE MENUS IN CAPS...

My generation is the one that grew up with the constant upgrade drive. Fortunately (or not), we're starting to leave the workforce as we get older. Heck, do millennials even use word processors and spreadsheets?

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Dunbal]

The issue is that 98% of people who use office exchange documents with the other 2%.

So logically it's the 98% that must adapt and keep up with the 2%, right? Something is wrong with the logic here. At some point the 2% need to realize that the tail doesn't wag the dog anymore.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Dunbal]

Outlook. Without that, we could switch reasonably easily.

And the amazing thing is Outlook is such a steaming pile of bloated buggy horseshit. And yet apparently no one can get rid of it.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook is dog shit software.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. My Office 2003 is still going. It even has a patch that allows it to work with the XML-formats - docx, xlsx, etc. It is probably too old for intense use that depends on new features, but I don't use it that way.

I have seen the ribbon. I will not have it on my own system.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[tsa]

It's not the figuring out that surprises me but the fact that they don't die of shame doing this.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[CastrTroy]

If FOSS does the job for you, then you are fine to go ahead and use it for free. but personally I find that OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. It's missing too many key features and just isn't polished enough for my tastes. Even without the troubles incurred when it comes to sharing documents with other computer users, OpenOffice still doesn't meet my needs.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Looks like that comment ruffled some feathers. I think it's a fair question: in what way was any business forced to buy an enterprise licence and then to switch to Office 365? I've never heard of this in any big business I've worked at/with. It could be that Microsoft has recently changed policy and somehow forced this shift as the GP implied. Or it could be that the GP has misunderstood the situation or is exaggerating significantly for effect. It's not unreasonable to ask which is the case.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Dr. Evil]

And FOSS hasn't replicated it with any success in 20 years.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[aaarrrgggh]

Outlook calendar integration is quite solid. Comparing with Google calendar I would say G is a 7 and MS a 9. The things that google does badly can be painful depending on your workflow. Outlook/Exchange are also the go-to for many third-party applications.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't just for Word and it's not for your mom.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[mysidia]

The problem is not the Word processor. LibreOffice needs feature parity with Excel, As Excel is the major justification I hear many people have for staying with Office. And then after getting that TRUE feature parity, LibreOffice need to add some "killer app" functionality, like a better MS Access than MS Access, and a way to handle collaborative databases and cloud-hosted collaborative databases.

And then get a major marketing campaign to show how LibreOffice Does everything Excel does and more

Re:Absolutely baffling

[mysidia]

The other issue is that office 365 includes outlook, which open office does NOT match in any capacity.

What happened to the US having antitrust legislation? If they offer tied products, they should be required to also sell Outlook
  and Outlook services separately at its proportionate cost. Tying Outlook to these other solutions is anticompetitive behavior by MS.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Googles office suite runs faster? Now I know you're making shit up. Try loading non-trivial data sets into their spreadsheet. I was working with some data in the order of 10K items, not huge by any modern measure, and some operations would take literally a minute to complete, load the same data set in to excel, it'd do the same operations so quickly there was no discernible delay.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[DigiShaman]

POP3 is dogshit! IMAP is slightly better, but pales in comparison with Exchange. With MS Exchange (the gold standard for enterprise), Contacts, Calendar, and Task items sync seamlessly between client and server. No need to worry about loss of email or fragmented content between devices. In addition, you can setup shared mailboxes, grant full or partial read access to a co-workers mailbox, setup automated rules, and even set permission to allow someone to respond to an email on behalf of someone else. Exchange is POWERFUL!!!

Re: Absolutely baffling

[guruevi]

You want something that rivals Outlook? How about Thunderbird? Outlook is absolute garbage, come back when you've tried a real PIM.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[guruevi]

Then you should switch him to a new version of Adobe/Microsoft products. How many iterations has MSN Messenger been through? I think it's called Lync now or was it Skype?

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Contacts, Calendar, and Task items sync seamlessly between client and server. No need to worry about loss of email or fragmented content between devices.

Haha you must be new here to Exchange.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[guruevi]

What doesn't it do? Filling in cells and making calculations is all Excel should be used for, for everything else there is R.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[DigiShaman]

I'm an expert. I've been an Exchange administrator since the days of v5.5. To this day, my job is working with SMB (Small Medium Business) clients to transition away from MS Exchange and into Office 365. It's cheaper and more reliable overall. In fact, Microsoft Windows SBS (Small Business Server) has been deprecated and replaced with Server Essentials. It's in effect SBS without Exchange; knowing full well that role has been moved to the cloud - Office 365.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to out yourself even further as a Microsoft shill -- or are you just dumb?

2017:
Wasting your companys money on needless constant software upgrades

I hear Walmart and McDonalds are hiring, I think you're more suited to working there than in IT.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Passman]

Way to out yourself as a child who's never actually worked in any kind of enterprise environment.

Oh really?
We just finished our Office 2016 rollout a few months ago here. It was mostly MS Office 2016 Standard with a smattering of Pro Plus just to make things interesting.

Our previous version? Office 2007, and that rollout in 2010 was a replacement for Office 2003. We will probably stick with Office 2016 for another 6-8 years so our next version will likely be Office 2025, assuming they still have a purchase option then.

Just because you're stuck in Software Assurance hell is no reason to assume that every small to medium sized business blindly follows Microsoft's upgrade cycle.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

and that is why you, or people like you, will never run business or be in strategic roles at companies.. company's job is to make MONEY

MS is a business.. their job is to figure out how to make people use their software.

Just like Apple, eBay, Amazon, etc.. it becomes a part of life.

Also, MS strategy is simple - go after business, workers use O365 at work, and then workersuse it at home.

Google is trying the other way - going after the education market and hoping kids/teachers use GSuite at home.

If companies put logic like you did - they would not exist.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[jurnyman]

Are we actually attempting to portray Office 365 as just the suite of traditional desktop apps in this thread? Wow. The revenue reported here includes exchange online, skype hours, sharepoint online, security products, rights management, enterprise clients, yammer, teams and ton of other things that aren't even remotely included in open office. Sure, these might not be things you see value in, but this isn't a situation where a bunch of stupid people at running out paying extra for something that you are getting for free.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

If the names and icons are an issue, then actually using that other software would be completely impossible.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

it's been neutered to the point of ineffectiveness by regulatory capture.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

My generation is the one that grew up with the constant upgrade drive. Fortunately (or not), we're starting to leave the workforce as we get older. Heck, do millennials even use word processors and spreadsheets?

Millennial MBAs like their predecessors use spreadsheets to masturbate as they reduce corporate work forces and expenses to boost the bottom line tax haven protected income. Millennials eagerly compete for minimum wage jobs because they have been coddled and lulled into a slave society suckling at the tit of the oligarchs.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[ShanghaiBill]

What happened to the US having antitrust legislation?

Have you been following the election returns for the last few decades? Do you know which party controls the presidency, the supreme court, the senate, the house, 2/3rds of the governorships, and most of the state legislatures?

Hint: It isn't the antitrust party.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

If FOSS does the job for you, then you are fine to go ahead and use it for free. but personally I find that OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. It's missing too many key features and just isn't polished enough for my tastes. Even without the troubles incurred when it comes to sharing documents with other computer users, OpenOffice still doesn't meet my needs.

For most of my written work I use vim and LaTex or markdown or in some situations Google Docs. At my new startup I am trying to move everyone to a plain text editor, of their choosing, and markdown and LaTeX via templates. I will be firing the so-called software engineer because his programme code is at the level of the average first semester computer science student - in other words, maintainable garbage.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Well for colleges/schools, Office 365 gives out a 50GB email inbox. So if you are in education you'd be an absolute idiot to not use 365 for your students. I suspect a lot of their usage comes from this.

Which btw is absolutely brilliant on their part. Its the same idea as the PC way back when they were first around. If people work on one thing all day, give them the same thing in their personal life and they already know how to use it.

Yes you do have to give MS credit. Say what you want about their software, they are great at getting other peoples money.

BTW openoffice is junk, along with ever other open-source version (copy) of office out there.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[vux984]

"You want something that rivals Outlook? How about Thunderbird?"

I use both. Side by side. Thunderbird is fine and I love it. But its not even in the same league.

IMAP is simply not as powerful as Exchange; the meeting / calendar / contact / directory support for thunderbird is a PITA. You can't set up server side rule processing, away messages, forwarding, etc within Thunderbird. Moving large amounts of messages around still weak. Company contact directory support is a PITA. And even mailbox setup is simply more work; the autoconfiguration you get with Office 365 is fantastic.

" Outlook is absolute garbage"

It's really perfectly serviceable now. It was deplorable in the past.

"come back when you've tried a real PIM."

My Thunderbird profile is 4.5GB. I even used to post to USENET from it, and read RSS, because it wasn't a bad at that either. I still use it with 3 mailboxes, two proper IMAP, my ISP mail via POP3, and one gmail box via IMAP.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Found the real Microsoft shill. Are you paid by the word, the post, do you get a monthy stipend, or are you a salaried Microsoft employee?

Re:Absolutely baffling

[eneville]

I disagree. For someone on that level, the interfaces are pretty confusing and unfamiliar so a totally different OS may go unnoticed. Other than it'll now 10x faster due to no need for A/V.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[rahvin112]

A Microsoft enterprise license already includes the ability to use the newest software as soon as it's released. My understand is that the difference this time is the new enterprise license terms charge extra if you aren't using Office365. Microsoft is gaming their deployment numbers by exploiting licensing terms to force people to upgrade. This forced most large business to upgrade because it costs more not to. Now mind you they could have already upgraded without cost, the license change was simply to accelerate this change, likely so they could game their deployment numbers for wall street.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bull Moose party?

Re:Absolutely baffling

[mysidia]

Have you been following the election returns for the last few decades? Do you know which party controls the presidency, the supreme court, the senate, the house,

The Supreme Court's purpose in life is to be an independent judiciary: its members not to be concerned about political matters or political parties.

Regardless of the political views of the current president or senate they all have a legal obligation to faithfully uphold the laws of the land,
and the Antitrust laws are among the laws of the land.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

I often get grouped in with millennials (1985). I use ledger-cli for my finances, and used to use LibreOffice for resumes or other copy. The big suites are huge on space, have numerous dependencies, and take over half an hour to compile. I'd rather learn and use TeX.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

So when somebody decides to be the only person making objective observations that makes him the Microsoft shill? Most of the other posts in this conversation are dumb as fuck ad this guy is the idiot. Welcome to /. 2017

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice provides enterprise mail, Calendaring, IM, conferencing, document collaboration and coediting, TBs of cloud file sharing, social networking, team chat and collaboration, rights mgmt, etc?

Tell me more!

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

OK, that is clearer, thanks.

Sounds like in this case the businesses had already locked themselves in to some extent, presumably in exchange for significant discounts through enterprise licensing rather than buying individual copies, and now Microsoft is exploiting that lock-in to get its fingers deeper into the pie.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Kjella]

Are you sure that wasn't a tongue-in-cheek answer to the fact that Linux didn't have any of the software he's used to, only "equivalents" he'd have to learn from scratch? Because I have made that switch and it was almost a broken record "Does Linux have X? No, but Linux has Y which is kinda like X...", he probably just realized exactly what he asked for and decided to bail.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

'Objective observations', LOL. If you're a Microsoft fanboi then you're WRONG, plain and simple. Microsoft is CANCEROUS. If you can't agree with that then you're either a fool or a shill.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting about the 1TB OneDrive disk space and the 60 free Skype minutes which can be used to call phones in 60 different countries. Something really neat I recently discovered about Skype is the fact I can set what callerID I'd like to show on outgoing calls. Last but not least, I'd say peace of mind. Whenever you Google "Open Office compatibility" or "LibreOffice compatibility" one question which always comes up "will XXX feature be compatible from MS Office to [Libre,Open]Office?" To which the answer is usually "try it out and find out". By paying for MS Office, we get peace of mind, never having to ask ourselves if some feature or another is compatible across both products.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[bn-7bc]

Oh yea good old po, well not s good, I deffenetly do not miss poopp, but a local imap cliant, is a nice thing to have, I actually prefere thunderbird to gmails ui. I can`t remember tha mast time I used pop (it must have been late 1990s when my then ISP was draging their feet on imap rollout and rheir web msil eas absolutly horrid)

Re: Absolutely baffling

[unixisc]

I agree. However, the only reason to use Outlook is if one happens to have a Microsoft Exchange based messaging server, along w/ a need to integrate w/ an Office's e-mail setup. Otherwise, Thunderbird/Fossamail works just fine. For RSS, I just use FireFox and stage the feeds from the bookmarks toolbar

Re: Absolutely baffling

[vux984]

I agree. However, the only reason to use Outlook is if one happens to have a Microsoft Exchange based messaging server, along w/ a need to integrate w/ an Office's e-mail setup

Yes, also Google Apps Sync with outlook is pretty decent too. Not as seamless, but still pretty solid.

Thunderbird/Fossamail works just fine

However, people subscribe to google apps for enterprises or office 365 (hosted exchange) in large part to get the functionality that Thunderbird + IMAP simply does not have.

I love Thunderbird.Thunderbird is great at what it does, but its missing some big things... because IMAP is missing some big things. And OSS has never really stepped up to the plate and solved any of those items in a really good way.

I mean, I've even got my own owncloud deployment and DAVdroid etc to give me calendars and contacts on my phone etc without having it tied to google or microsoft; and mail plugins for thunderbird... so I've done that. But its hard to rationalize it; given that its just seamless.with office 365, and almost seamless with googleapps for business with the outlook connector.

The premium cost for a basic mailbox with either gmail or microsoft vs an imap mailbox... just isn't that high, and it's pretty easy to justify the expense for the functionality.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[rahvin112]

After a certain number of licenses you can't buy any more without executing an enterprise license agreement, this is one of the terms in EULA. If you have 500 employees and you are buying your software a license at at time you're wasting money and likely in violation of the license.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[thegarbz]

I think it's called Lync now or was it Skype?

And for all it's changes they have been so slow that there's actually little to no effort to cope with the change. The name is a classic example. Even though the upgrade the file is still called lync.exe, and the change from Lync to Skype for business was cosmetic. They didn't even move buttons around on the interface. Heck I'm not sure they did more than make the background white, the title blue, and eliminate window borders.

The last truly jarring change was the introduction of the ribbon. That one would have been a good opportunity for alternatives to be explored. Unfortunately OpenOffice wasn't ready to pick up the slack.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[thegarbz]

Other than it'll now 10x faster due to no need for A/V.

When the computer runs that fast it becomes impossible to form an understandable sentence. It's best to stick with windows.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

good docs is not usable software. Every tried to type a report in it? Ever tried to do a design document in it?

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would we like to replicate dog shit?

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what you're saying is that you have a substantial professional investment in the MS ecosystem, and we should be very aware of your biases.

That does explain your prior post that sounds more like ad copy than analysis.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Billly Gates]

Office 365 is more than word processing software. Office 365 also includes full hosted versions of SharePoint, intune, Skype for business, and Exchange and includes with subscription add ons crm like Dynamics and the Outlook Contact manager and cloud PBX for things like having dedicated numbers for phones and meetings under Skype from phones. With add ons businesses can also get intune, advanced threat protection, and exchange archiving for ediscovery and audits. Microsofts offers free technical support which is nice for small business who don't have dedicated IT departments. Now the home version sucks as you just get software

The vast majority of employers in North America are small business with less than 100 people.

To them they get some features that the big boys get and rents are tax deductible too! I credit Microsoft which unlike Adobe at least offers stuff when you are willing to go monthly.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anne Thwacks]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make .docx the default file format!

NO, NO, a thousand times no.

odt is a iso standard, documented well enough that it will still be readable on 50 years time. mandatory for government documents in many countries whose politicians are not controlled by MS.

docx is so badly documented it barely works now, and is not actually fit for purpose.

Introduce public hanging and flogging for even mentioning docx. It is even more urgent than stabbing systemd in the back with a stone axe.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Billly Gates]

For a small to medium sized business owner Outlook with all it's flaws has office 365 integration which includes Skype for business calling, outlook Contact manager for crm with clients, calendar events, etc.

Thunderbird is very dated and for non nerds is inferior over what office does. Sucks but that is a fact. Phb LOVE their free/busy when setting up a meeting. Office 365 includes additional add-ons like cloud pbx to add numbers to conferences to Skype so customers and vendors can call in with a phone.

Does Thunderbird do that?

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Billly Gates]

My opinion maybe unpopular here but am just stated how these users think ... not agreeing.

Office and Windows are not perfect. We all know this. The users do too. They use what works and brings best value.

Blue E = internet?? That was true 10 years ago. These same users all use Chrome with a few hanging onto Firefox. They switched to better products and until Firefox hit version 1.5/2.0 IE 6 was the better browser. IE 6 was more standards compliant than Netscape!!?? Go ask an old school web developer if you don't believe me. :-)

Now what users LOVE about office 365 is Outlook with free/Busy, Skype meetings where you can buy phone numbers for sales teams to dial in, exhange online, and SharePoint and free technical support. Nifty for non nerds like us for smaller to medium sized Businesses.

So it's not that they are stupid or ignorant. It's LibreOffice doesn't have an answer to Outlook or Skype or add ons like adding telephone numbers. Office is guaranteed not to misrender files too. Sucks but is reality. These users left IE when something better came. Give them this and they will cancel their expensive subscriptions

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We're not that big, but in any case, there's certainly no such restriction in the EULA for the off-the-shelf versions of Office anyone around here uses, all of which are licensed for commercial use. I just checked.

Maybe they've put that into the EULA for more recent versions? There seems so much junk attached to everything Microsoft releases these days that I don't think we've got much that they've launched in the past five years installed on anything anyway.

Just like when Adobe went CC only, we've found alternatives to use for our new systems and projects, and we just keep the odd copy of Office around for compatibility if we need them.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Billly Gates]

Office 365 home is the worst value.

Alot of ignorant slashdoters feel this is the same product you buy and users are retarded. That is plain wrong.

Office 365 small business includes SharePoint, exchange, Skype for business, outlook Contact manager, Microsoft teams, and additional add ons for extra like Dynamics, Phone numbers, intune PC and phone management, and free support from someone not in India asking you to restart your PC, but an actual experienced engineer.

For home not great. But for a small office and a few shops with just 18 users and NO IT guy or SERVER rack it's a great value. Small business is only $9 a month per user.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Tablizer]

MS-Office UI's are an utter mess and a feature pack-rat. I have had enough WTF moments when encountering new/changed Office products to fill an encyclopedia (remember those?). The bizarre semi-new "File" menu still makes me cringe. However, over time you just learn how to use Office features out of sheer rote memory because you have to if you want a pay-check.

Further, because everyone is using it, it's easier to find a Googled solution: the Network Effect. You don't know why you have to say press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F4 every third Tuesday of the month in Admin mode if you have a Samsung monitor, but you just learn that you do. Asking "why" is like asking to have Mormon doctrine logically explained. LibreOffice cannot compete with Education-by-Google (yet). MS-Office is the Rube Goldberg machine we know and love...well, at least know.

(I have some ideas for how to organize/manage features and feature-finders for feature-rich products, but that's another topic for another day.)

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure that wasn't a tongue-in-cheek answer to the fact that Linux didn't have any of the software he's used to, only "equivalents" he'd have to learn from scratch? Because I have made that switch and it was almost a broken record "Does Linux have X? No, but Linux has Y which is kinda like X...", he probably just realized exactly what he asked for and decided to bail.

One of the problems with support for non-professionals is that while we know there's only one Angry Birds, or Outlook, or Facebook, or Blackberry Messenger, we're just asked how someone can run the original on all devices (people don't grok that software compilation in the form of ports, let alone emulation).

Sometimes there's a Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, MacOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone port, but most of the time, they're disgusted that there ISN'T, and reject learning about alternatives because of network effects. The problem here is sometimes that's a huge percent of he reason to hate the systems / devices they have, or plan to buy. In the real world, Coca Cola is NOT Pepsi Cola and what is puzzling is the lengths some people will go in their denial that a perfect use-everywhere world does not exist.

Often, that's by design... QR code readers aren't common on Windows, Outlook for the Mac isn't close to Outlook for Windows, $Game is a Nintendo Exclusive, etc.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

So logically it's the 98% that must adapt and keep up with the 2%, right? Something is wrong with the logic here. At some point the 2% need to realize that the tail doesn't wag the dog anymore.

Necessary functions are necessary.

Sometimes another method can be substituted, but there is a loss of efficiency.

If the cost of the loss of efficiency is greater than the cost of paying for the MS Office subscriptions, then BUY THE FUCKING SUBSCRIPTIONS.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Carrot007]

Trouble is I like to open and edit my spreadsheets at work sometimes.

And regardless of format opening a libreoffice saved spredsheet in excel does some really nasty things to formatting. Same the other way round and the word processor does not fair much better either.

So office it is! Good job my works licence enables me to install 5 copies (or is it 6, I forget, like I need that many!). Only odd thing is my works usues office 2010 and the licence lets me install the current version as far as i can tell. Not that moving beetween office versions has been an issue since office 2010.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[timmyf2371]

MS Office is my preferred office suite software at home and at work, but I wouldn't pay $100 per year (or equivalent in GBP) for personal use, even to cover my whole family. I think it's too expensive considering our typical level of usage at home - things like managing the budget in Excel, updating resumes, capturing text in a nicely formatted way.

I currently have Office 2013 which I picked up for c. £10 via the Microsoft Home Use Program. I might upgrade to the latest version at some point, but only if the price is right.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Solandri]

The only reason I see to prefer Office to any other mail and calendaring solutions is because it's integrated into the company directory, and if the company would divorce its personnel directory from office, that advantage would disappear too.

This is correct, but companies love Outlook and Outlook server because it includes tools for corporate management of mail, scheduling, tasks, which no other software offers in a meaningfully competitive way. If LibreOffice would concentrate on what companies want (encrypted email management, admin management of mail accounts including retroactively wiping out a fired employee's access while retaining all his mail, etc), they'd get that last 2% and become a serious threat to Office. But alas most of the people working on LibreOffice are anti-corporation, and refuse to add features which would be useful to a company. And as a result, that 2% sticks with Office, forcing a large chunk of the 98% who interacts with that 2% to stick with Office.

Google's Gmail/Calendar/ToDo suite isn't as robust as Outlook, but it's the closest competitor. That's where I'm seeing the companies who don't want to pay the Microsoft Office tax migrating to, instead of LibreOffice.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

At my office, rather than letting the big-shots dictate what software to use or what features are required and generally telling us how to do our jobs, we use core dumps for all of our documents. It is VERY liberating.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

I can back that up. Our lab has a couple of shared spreadsheets in Google whatever and they're painfully slow on every system I've ever accessed them on. There are no more than a few thousand entries and it's horrible to use.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a couple of oddballs - what replaced or will replace Direct Show and InfoPath.

Those are a couple of niches could make good 3rd party markets.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Excelcia]

I'd rather learn and use TeX.

You and the other three grad students whose theses are, coincidentally, on various aspects of the use of TeX. Well, them and that one who is writing about Stockholm Syndrome. Incidentally, when that last paper is finished, you need to read it.

I often get grouped in with millennials

No you don't. No, really, you don't. Given the above quote it is evident to...well... everyone else that any use of the word millennial with you anywhere near the subject is either undetected sarcasm or attempts at comforting you.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to call bullshit on anyone that claims they have used both Googles and Microsoft's office and found Googles offering better. Googles is a decent substitute if you can't afford or don't have MS Office but that is about it.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[gravewax]

yes and yet nothing in the Open Source world comes anywhere near being as good. kinda sad really.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

No, anybody who says

You must be a Miscreant-o-soft shill. Please kill yourself.

is a child. His statement actually didn't preclude the existence of children who have worked in an enterprise environment or non-children who have not.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[eneville]

No, what he is saying is that he is is a government administration expert. Through transitioning businesses to Office 365 the government's workflow of generating thousands of search warrants is now reduced to just one as they need only access to one address to carry out thousands of searches in a single instance.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[eneville]

What you mean is you have not learnt anything else in the last 20 years sufficiently to do what is basic. That's what is sad.

The most secure mailer IMO is mutt with lynx HTML viewer. It's also by the fastest to load my multigig mailbox. YMMV, given it cost me nothing, runs persistently in a screen session on a VPS with 64MB of RAM, I'll call it my cloud solution too.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[gravewax]

you should take a page out of your own book. Learn what Outlook actually is and does, a mailer is a tiny fraction of what it does. If you are just comparing mail functions then yeah there are a heap of better apps.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[eneville]

Sorry, yes, it does other things too, and quite well. It's great for example at delivering viruses to users, simply by the mail arriving in the mailbox [1], yes, a remote exploit for a mailer. This [2] shit [3] still [4] continues [5]. What is is meant to be good at? If you're about to say calendar, sorry, mine's full fixing problems where MS is the SPOF.

    1: http://www.securityfocus.com/a...
    2: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve...
    3: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve...
    4: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve...
    5: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve...

Re: Absolutely baffling

[Dr. Evil]

"Why would we like to replicate dog shit?"

Underneath that dog shit is group calendaring and scheduling, server-side mail filters, server-side search, mobile integration, etc, etc. etc.

Caldav, Carddav and IMAP, combined with Thunderbird + Lightning + roundcube to unreliabily mimic a good meaty chunk of the dog shit, but it's a lot more work for results that still, despite FOSS innovation, miss key features, add nothing but complex administration and are worse than the dog shit itself. Thunderbird is mostly a better email client, but there's nothing stopping you from pointing it at an Exchange backend. Infact, most developers are used to this as OWA is the defacto enterprise groupware client on Linux, and nobody likes doing webmail.

Kontact, Evolution, etc are examples of FOSS trying to replicate dog shit, but they're doomed to merely accomplish some simulation of the terrible UI, with lots of unreliable connectors and translators to MS backends.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Openoffice is unfortunately a pretty dead project and should probably not be touched or recommended to anyone who do not know what they are doing.
Instead, go with LibreOffice (a fork of Openoffice) that is maintained and have a good amount of developers behind it.

LibreOffice has telemetry: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/89256/does-libreoffice-snoop-on-users-documents-really/

Re: Absolutely baffling

[guruevi]

I compared Thunderbird to Outlook, Thunderbird with extensions comes close, I've never seen Outlook correctly connect to (open) CalDAV servers. There are better PIM's out there, GroupWise and Evolution are the ones I am familiar with, OwnCloud also seems to be getting close to it although I don't personally use it, the integration on iOS and Mac of open source calendaring, address book, mail etc also is a great deal better than Outlook + O365.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason we need judges is because the law is open to interpretation. And although judges may not have political concerns, that doesn't mean they don't hold to a political ideology. Where the law allows them to they will tend to their ideology, and when a place on the supreme court becomes available whoever is in the White House will nominate candidates that favor their own ideology.

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloated? Maybe, but it runs quickly enough and doesn't slow my system down. Buggy? It seems perfectly stable and bug free in my usage, the only bug I've noticed is that it keeps adding its icon to my quick-laucher, which I then promptly delete. Otherwise it does its job well.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[DigiShaman]

No, I work in the private sector for a small MSP (Managed Service Provider). But, you are correct in that Office 365 does make the eDiscovery process far easier. If require by law, the fishing will occur. The only difference is how much (or little) hell do you want to subject the system admin to?

Re:Absolutely baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

When MS Office isn't even compatible with it's own versions. It's no excuse to keep people tied to those products.

Re: Absolutely baffling

[vux984]

I compared Thunderbird to Outlook, Thunderbird with extensions comes close

On paper maybe. But not in reality.

I've never seen Outlook correctly connect to (open) CalDAV servers

So? They use google g suite sync or hosted exchange (office 365), where calendar sync works brilliantly. Saying Outlook doesn't play as well with CalDAV servers is like saying Thunderbird doesn't play well with exchange that's only available through https proxy...

Its true... but kind of irrelevant.

the integration on iOS and Mac of open source calendaring, address book,

OSX mail + address book + calendar? Please. Simple toys that only work well if you fit everything you need to fit into their substantial limitations.

OwnCloud also seems to be getting close to it although I don't personally use it

I use owncloud, and its not trivial to get it working with phones etc. Yes It works... but my mom couldn't do it. Just as she isn't going to cobble a complete system together out of Tbird extensions.

She can use office 365.

No surprise there

[AlanObject]

I ended up converting last year and it is actually a better deal all around. If you work in the business world you inevitably have to deal with MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Powerpoint sludge.

What I like is that I can install multiple legal copies on different devices including family members.

Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

Re:No surprise there

[cayenne8]

Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

It is precisely THAT kind of thinking that is going to possibly eventually *doom* us all to perpetual, rental of software, rather than ownership (perpetual license if you're picky)...and that is NOT a good thing for consumers.

Once the companies have you trapped in rental..they really have no incentive to improve and innovate now do they?

We've seen it with Adobe's Creative Cloud rental system....you haven't seen any truly breakthrough improvements to date. Yes, they roll out some nice things here and there, but nothing that is earthshaking. I've certainly not found I miss anything by still using my CS6 apps I bought.

And we've seen problems with Adobe CC...they will roll stuff out that breaks on peoples systems, and well....you're SOL till they can get an online fix out, meanwhile, you lose business.

There are also people who've lost out by having their registration get lost in the system or broken, and again...they are SOL till customer service can help, and well, I think with most of these places we know the terms "customer service" and "help" are mutually exclusive terms.

I can see it going this way with ANY software rental.

The best way to avoid this is to pay with your wallet.

Re:No surprise there

[imidan]

I ended up converting last year and it is actually a better deal all around.

Okay. I bought a retail boxed copy of Office 2010 Home some years ago. Let's say 2012, since otherwise it would be Office 2013. It specifically allows me to install it on multiple computers (three to five, I can't remember; I only have it one two). I don't remember exactly what I paid anymore, but let's pretend it was $150 (that's what a standalone copy costs now). That means I've had use of this software for five years at an amortized cost of $30/year. That cost per year continues going down every year that I still use 2010--and I will, because at the moment, I don't perceive that there have been any great advances in word processing technology in the last 7 years. The cost of Office 365 Home is $100 per year. That really doesn't sound like a better deal to me.

If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

And if you want to be a smart grown up, you don't pay more for things than you need to, especially by paying over and over again for things you can just pay for once.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If you work in the business world you inevitably have to deal with MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Powerpoint sludge.

This is a lot less true than it used to be. None of the day-to-day data that I deal with has been in any of those formats for a long time.

The sad thing is, it still only needs one or two exceptions -- say, exporting a spreadsheet to send to your accountant or a contract for review and markup by your lawyers -- to make it worth the cost of buying MS rather than risking data loss in translation. Fortunately, for us it's only things like legal/finance work where any avoidable risk is highly undesirable because of the potential costs of even small errors, which also means it's only MS Office where this applies. Keeping around the odd pre-365 copy we already bought is sufficient here.

Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

From a business point of view, what it costs is just a business expense and is either worth it or it isn't.

The bigger reason we won't rent software for anything truly essential to our business operations is that it can be changed, made more expensive, or even entirely turned off, at any time, according to nothing but the whims of the software developer. Given the track record of the software industry collectively and of some of these big name developers in particular for shipping updates that their customers don't actually want, interrupting functionality due to downtime, or even discontinuing entire product lines that are no longer strategically convenient, that's far too much risk for business to take with anything that actually matters, IMHO.

Re: No surprise there

[DigiShaman]

SAS (Software As Service) is replacing the old model precisely because it's a reoccurring expenditure; specifically when it's annual. It's far easier to budget for, can ensure everyone in office is at the latest version for compatibility, and is equal or less in cost when amortized against one-off purchases of boxed software over a set period of time.

Re:No surprise there

[WaffleMonster]

I ended up converting last year and it is actually a better deal all around. If you work in the business world you inevitably have to deal with MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Powerpoint sludge.

No it isn't. It's just stupid. You can buy Office 2010 on ebay for what... $60 and own it forever. This is substantially less than one year rental cost of Office 365.

What of any meaningful value does Office 2010 not do that your 365 subscription can?

Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

If you want to be a grown up you have to be able to do basic math. Paying more over time isn't smart or intelligent. It doesn't make you a grown up. It doesn't improve cash flow. It is simply throwing money away for no reason.

Re:No surprise there

[mysidia]

Once the companies have you trapped in rental..they really have no incentive to improve and innovate now do they?

I dislike it so much, that I think there should be a law against it. Something liek....

SQUATTERS RIGHTS ON SOFTWARE

If software or the right to the legal possession of software is included as a product or service, then after a consumer's use of that service and/or legal possession of that copy of software has continued for 12 calendar months without permanent cancellation or termination of the consumer's privilege to use the software, then after the 12th month, that consumer receives a permanent, unconditional, irrevocable right to continue use of all their copies of software, to disable, circumvent, or otherwise modify or duplicate any security or other features of any aspect of their copy of software in any manner required to make software continue to function, and/or transfer or convey their rights to one or all copies of their software without restriction, notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary.

Re:No surprise there

[AlanObject]

And if you want to be a smart grown up, you don't pay more for things than you need to, especially by paying over and over again for things you can just pay for once.

Office 365 has a lot of features that Office 20xx did not have. You did not get 5TB of cloud storage with Office 20xx for one thing. Or online support. Or 60 minutes of Skype to landline calls per month. Or phone support. So to come up with a valid comparison you have to realize that the product+services of Office 365 is not the same as the product-only of an obsolete version of the software.

Re:No surprise there

[AlanObject]

From a business point of view, what it costs is just a business expense and is either worth it or it isn't.

The bigger reason we won't rent software for anything truly essential to our business operations is that it can be changed, made more expensive, or even entirely turned off, at any time, according to nothing but the whims of the software developer.

Your theory seems to be based on the idea that Microsoft will cut off their revenue stream from you for no purpose other than buggery and to piss you off. Sorry but I just don't find this very convincing.

I agree that the Microsoft suite is by no means as essential as it once was. This is actually a good thing because to keep Microsoft will then have pressure to improve the product rather than just relying on droits.

Re:No surprise there

[AlanObject]

If you want to be a grown up you have to be able to do basic math. Paying more over time isn't smart or intelligent. It doesn't make you a grown up. It doesn't improve cash flow. It is simply throwing money away for no reason.

If you assume Office 365 === Office 2010 then you might have a point about basic math. Office 365 comes with many features and services that you do not get with an one-time license to Office 2010.

Re: No surprise there

[guruevi]

I explicitly convert everything down to a common standard.

Last time a legal department sent me a Signed PDF which wanted to open some JavaScript and talk to Adobe servers and then I should create an account with Adobe while Adobe held onto my public/private key for signing.

I opened the PDF in a non-Adobe product, saved and signed it with a copy of my real signature (which the app happily took from the camera), sent it back. It thoroughly broke their automatic processing but they went on with it (insert Johnny Tables reference here) because nobody at the office understood why it wasn't working (it looked like I signed it after all).

Re:No surprise there

[UnknownSoldier]

> If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

Only an idiot keeps paying for the same thing over and over again.

A real adult understands a) amortization, and b) sharing of knowledge.

a) In a few years a kid is able to learn almost the previous 4,000 years of Mathematics.
b) Likewise, by pooling our knowledge we are able to get Operating Systems and Applications for zero cost.

One day when you grow up you'll realize collaboration makes more sense then competition and artificial price gouging.
 

Re:No surprise there

[AlanObject]

Only an idiot keeps paying for the same thing over and over again.

So do you pay your utility companies, ISP, health care provider, insurance and other services you use over time? I guess you are an idiot. Thank you for sharing.

Re: No surprise there

[jon3k]

The only reason this is being pushed is because it's getting harder and harder to convince people they need to upgrade Office. I'd argue that most people could get by with Office 2003 and almost guarantee they could get by with Office 2007 which was released over 10 years ago.

and is equal or less in cost when amortized against one-off purchases of boxed software

Maybe if you're upgrading every year? Which we all know is completely unnecessary. Office 2016 Home & Student is $149 and Office 365 Personal is $6.99/mo. That means if you keep your office version for two years, it is cheaper to buy a boxed copy than pay for a subscription. No one would argue you could easily use the same version of Office for TWICE that period of time.

This is rent seeking, plain and simple. They're trying to structure it in such a way to increase your cost unnecessarily and force you to make purchases you wouldn't have otherwise needed.

Re:No surprise there

[transporter_ii]

Maybe this will help with stupid changes just to come out with new versions, then. I don't mind change, but lets face it, everyone hates freaking change. If it works and is making money, maybe they are just leaving it the hell alone?

Re: No surprise there

[DigiShaman]

You can call it what you want; no skin off my back. But in the world of software, progress is a moving target. Doesn't matter if you like it or not, I'm simply making a factual statement. Hardware changes, as does the OS to support it, and the applications too. The whole stack is a moving organism. A standing wave of progress if you will. You know, "the only constant is change" thing.

In business that relies on this technology, you can either upgrade in leap-frog fashion, or replace / upgrade as you go in dribs and drabs. Businesses prefer the later. It's easier to budget for. The bean counters want it that way.

Re:No surprise there

[dj245]

Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

It is precisely THAT kind of thinking that is going to possibly eventually *doom* us all to perpetual, rental of software, rather than ownership (perpetual license if you're picky)...and that is NOT a good thing for consumers.

Once the companies have you trapped in rental..they really have no incentive to improve and innovate now do they?

We've seen it with Adobe's Creative Cloud rental system....you haven't seen any truly breakthrough improvements to date. Yes, they roll out some nice things here and there, but nothing that is earthshaking. I've certainly not found I miss anything by still using my CS6 apps I bought.

And we've seen problems with Adobe CC...they will roll stuff out that breaks on peoples systems, and well....you're SOL till they can get an online fix out, meanwhile, you lose business.

There are also people who've lost out by having their registration get lost in the system or broken, and again...they are SOL till customer service can help, and well, I think with most of these places we know the terms "customer service" and "help" are mutually exclusive terms.

I can see it going this way with ANY software rental.

The best way to avoid this is to pay with your wallet.

I'm fairly certain that Adobe software today would be utter crap regardless of it was a one-time purchase or as a recurring payment. They have been on that path for years, if not decades.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing is, it still only needs one or two exceptions -- say, exporting a spreadsheet to send to your accountant or a contract for review and markup by your lawyers -- to make it worth the cost of buying MS rather than risking data loss in translation.

Law firms should have standardised on LaTex decades ago and accountants should have standardised on comma-separated-values (CSV) decades ago. For accountants any formulae and advanced numeric functionality can be handled by specialised applications such as R/RStudio for example. For the lawyers plain text combined with a revision control system for editing and LaTeX for final publication would make law firms more flexible, efficient, and productive while improving communication between parties. Electronic filing of documents with the courts would be simplified as well, not to mention discovery and disclosure.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's a general principle, not specific to Microsoft. In any case, it's clear that Microsoft is quite willing to update its software in ways that its customers don't want and try to force them to adopt the changes, and life's too short to put up with that sort of abuse.

Re:No surprise there

[kbrannen]

Hmm, none of the things you listed are important to me or anyone I've talked to about office software ... possibly ever. If those things help you, great, but don't use those features as arguments as to why online office is better than the 20xx versions because I believe they aren't useful to the masses.

Personally, 2010 was the best version for me and I plan to continue to use that as I've not found any new feature in 2013 or 2016 version that make me want to upgrade; in fact, I've found several new features in 2013 that make me dislike parts of Office quite a bit.

Office is a mature product and doesn't need anything new -- just bug fixes. So "rental" will always be the more expensive solution.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I tend to agree, but since the legal systems in many countries still operate with the technical savvy of a 10th century monk, many lawyers couldn't change even if they wanted to, because they wouldn't then be compliant with the court-mandated formatting conventions for their documents.

But also, there's not really any denying that the familiar revision control features in software like Word are much easier for non-technical folks to use than the diff tools in a typical programmer's version control system.

It would be nice to think that one day we would need neither court-mandated awful formatting nor clunky UIs in software just to present and share basic information in a clear and reliable way. Surely we must have the technology...

Re:No surprise there

[AlanObject]

If those things help you, great, but don't use those features as arguments as to why online office is better than the 20xx versions because I believe they aren't useful to the masses.

I don't speak for the masses and if it weren't for business I probably wouldn't bother with Office at all. I have no inside track into Microsoft but it seems they are aware of that so they are apparently successfully transitioning from a software product vendor to a software-and-services vendor. That changes the equations a lot more than many posters in this thread are aware.

For example, the Skype perk where I can call land lines from Skype for 60 minutes a month. If I go to Japan or Korea (it won't work in China) or somewhere else where cell phone minutes are $6/minute to back home, and I use 50 minutes of talk time, I have just saved $300 on my international bill. In that one month. That pays for Office 365 for 3 years.

Of course I can find other VoIP solutions that will avoid the international call charges but dear old Microsoft is doing their best to build an overall services package gets and keeps me as a customer because it is a better deal. Isn't that what capitalism is supposed to be based on?

Apparently I am not alone in seeing this. The article points out that MS now sells more Office 365 than one-time licenses for Office. But you wouldn't know it from the heated responses I drew in this thread.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

Office 365 has a lot of features that Office 20xx did not have.

Actual functionality that basic users will use or added fluff they use to justify the price?

You did not get 5TB of cloud storage with Office 20xx for one thing.

I have never used or wanted "cloud" storage. I have ample storage space online as it is, no need for someone else's cloud.

Or online support.

I have never used or wanted online support. Google is sufficient to help me out of any jams that have solutions.

Or 60 minutes of Skype to landline calls per month.

I have never used or wanted Skype to anything. And who has landlines anymore?

Or phone support.

I have never used or wanted phone support.

So to come up with a valid comparison you have to realize that the product+services of Office 365 is not the same as the product-only of an obsolete version of the software.

If they aren't services that you would use, then the added value is 0. And older versions of Office have the added benefit of being able to run indefinitely without an internet connection or a Microsoft account. They just work. How can you put a price on that?

And just how are older versions obsolete? I'm still running Office 2008 for Mac. It does everything I need. Not once have I thought "Damn, not having the latest version is really holding me back!" That sort of an improvement usually only comes along about once every 10-15 years or so, the last of which was in Office 2007/2008 (and then they took a step back with that stupid ribbon interface in 2010/2011). Office 2016 for Mac does add a key improvement (64-bit), but that won't be important until Apple goes 64-bit only next year. So Office 2008 will keep working for me on anything running a pre-2018 OS and an upgrade to Office 2016 or later won't be needed until after I need to upgrade something to a 2018 or later OS. But if we use 2018 as the transition date, that means I've gotten 10 years out of this and have a version I can run on all of my older machines.

That's a huge value, though not really comparable to the $1,000 cost for 10 years of Office 365 because Office 365 hasn't been around that long and the current standalone versions are more restrictive (1 computer) than they were in the past. That's really the kicker - Microsoft is making Office 365 a better value not because it's a cheaper option, but because they made the standalone alternative more expensive. They throw in some extras so you're getting MORE!!!, but you're probably not doing much more than you were before, you're just paying more. Soon, the days of "owning" software will be over and everything will either be free or a rental. I'm just glad that most of my computers are too old to ever be forced into that misery.

Re:No surprise there

[kbrannen]

If you assume Office 365 === Office 2010 then you might have a point about basic math. Office 365 comes with many features and services that you do not get with an one-time license to Office 2010.

Please list some of these features the average person can't live without. To me, 2013 was a step backwards in functionality and I've yet to find any new feature in 2013 that is worth the upgrade cost. I've looked at the new feature list for 2016 and again I can't find anything worth upgrading for.

I can say that 2013 introduced the "borderless window frames" that make it hard to resize the window. It also gave me changed options that make the various Office apps harder to use without having to track down how to turn them off in the options. Making the Outlook panes look like they did in 2010 is truly hard. Search seems to not be able to find things now (that are there). The All/Unread views randomly (yet frequently) decide they have nothing to show me until I click on the other and then go back (where they now have something to show me). I could go on with the regressions, but I think the horse is sufficiently dead.

Re:No surprise there

[AlanObject]

Please list some of these features the average person can't live without.

As I have written above, if it weren't for business I probably wouldn't bother with MS Office at all. I make no pretense for speaking for the "average" person but as the article states, a lot of people have opted for the Office 365 over the one-time license. Maybe that majority is the elite or maybe they represent the average. I don't care.

I have no interest in a pointless series of quibbles about whether this or that feature the added/removed/changed in one version to the next is desirable or not. There are many web pages that list what the changes are and what their benefits are. But you don't like them. Fine. Other people do.

As for business my time is worth such that if the phone/online support that comes with Office 365 ends up saving me one hour per year of time that I can convert to billable hours then I am money ahead for that year. Same goes for the cloud storage and online collaboration which some customers uses. It amounts to more billable hours from my side.

If your time is worth $0 or you don't see anything in Office 365 package would not save you time then yes, I would say staying with the one-time license deal for the obsolete version of the software is the better decision for you.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been reading and downmodding your ignorant trash. I've just got to say you're one fucking pathetically stupid millennial flower, aren't you?

Get a brain, get a real job, and get out of your parents basement, you idiotic fucktard.

Pay $1000 for a 10 year rental instead of $150 to buy outright. You're beyond stupid.

60 minutes of free skype instead of $6/minute makes the $1000 rental worth it. My god you are stupid. How about get a local sim card like every single person who is not a total fuckwit like you? Fuck, just subscribe to skype for the month you take the tip.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it sounds bad if you are talking about a single license for a single computer. Office 365 Home gets you five PC/Mac installs and 5 tablet installs. For my family of four, each of us has our own computer, and Word Excel Outlook PowerPoint Publisher OneNote is used extensively by my teenagers and wife for school and jobs at home, and installed on a few tablets/phones. Overall that's $25 per person per year, better than your single license example. And you can purchase it cheaper through various places like Amazon or Newegg for $80, so even better.

Sure we could run LibreOffice for free, but it doesn't have Outlook and many of the perks that come with Office 365. And it is nowhere near as good or polished. I'm not abusing my family with free crap just because it's free.

Having to purchase multiple licenses on a 3 or 5 year upgrade doesn't make sense then. Office 365 is cheaper overall than "owning" old software.

Re:No surprise there

[david_thornley]

By the same reasoning, the extra cost to buy a Mac is well worth it for everyone, because it has features other computers don't have.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's the services they're selling. Just like IBM in the day - the software was just a tool; the services were what you paid for. OTOH, MS is moving so solidly into the always-connected, fully servicing (using that term advisedly and agriculturally) mode that they're leaving a market behind that can't or doesn't want to afford the ongoing charges. Yes, it's like renting your computer and everything in it (just like with IBM mainframes), and your data live or die at the whim of the pricing structure as well as the continued functioning of the network (smart terminals, right?).

Comes down to diff'ren' strokes. Individuals and many small businesses don't need to be "in the cloud" for everything. There will always be a need for some local, independent computing power beyond what's in your current smart terminal e.g. phone or tablet. Maybe not everybody will want to have it, but it's not a market that is going to just go away or be fully monetized (converted to rental). THAT particular hardware/software cat jumped out of the bag 1/2 decade before IBM came out with its PC, and won't go back in.

BTW, the comment about LibreOffice is actually right. It's evolved, basically, into an Office 2003 clone with many advanced features. Some people like the pretty-pictures approach of modern Office. But I can't find many things I need in that, and the menus have been essentially eliminated so I can't explore to find it. Try inserting something when you're working in the wrong ribbon, for instance. LO looks old but works well. Well worth the support

Re:No surprise there

[OrangeTide]

Good luck when tech companies inject so much money into politics through lobbyists and campaign contributions. (both secret and not-so-secret)

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

"The article points out that MS now sells more Office 365 than one-time licenses for Office."

Just to point out.. This is as misleading a statement as talking about the 'success' of windows 10 installs. When new customers have no choice, it's inevitable that the new product will eventually outstrip the old.

The idea that the *income* form office 365 outstripped perpetual licenses could also be precisely *because* office 365 rips more money away from the users than the perpetual licenses. Not saying this is the case, but it's an obvious alternate conclusion.

Any premise about office 365 being well-received because of the increase in its use or its derived income is a red herring.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you do an analysis of the costs of those individual items vs buying the rental model?

If so, you made a sound business decision.

If not, then you simply ate what MS marketing shoved down your throat...of which you said thank you sir may I have another.

Re:No surprise there

[Anne Thwacks]

Your theory seems to be based on the idea that Microsoft will cut off their revenue stream from you for no purpose other than buggery and to piss you off. Sorry but I just don't find this very convincing.

You are obviously new to to the world of commercial software. Most large software corporations exist solely for buggery and to piss you off. Or, at least, that is the impression they give the majority of their users.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

I ended up converting last year and it is actually a better deal all around. If you work in the business world you inevitably have to deal with MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Powerpoint sludge.

No it isn't. It's just stupid. You can buy Office 2010 on ebay for what... $60 and own it forever. This is substantially less than one year rental cost of Office 365.

What of any meaningful value does Office 2010 not do that your 365 subscription can?

Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

If you want to be a grown up you have to be able to do basic math. Paying more over time isn't smart or intelligent. It doesn't make you a grown up. It doesn't improve cash flow. It is simply throwing money away for no reason.

Disclaimer I worked on Microsofts office 365 support which is why I am anonymous.

What does office 365 do that office 2010 can't?

For one the business and enterprise editions offer Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, free support from someone not in India but rather an experienced IT guy. Add ons also include Microsoft Dynamics, PSTN phone numbers for phones and folks dialing in from phones, and other things.

Office 365 =! Office software. ... Unless you buy the home version :-).

So a medium sized office gets what the Enterprise gets without a system administrator and server room and renting is tax deductible too.

Re:No surprise there

[UnknownSoldier]

You DO realize there is a difference between Ownership, and Paying for a Service, right? I guess you are an idiot. Thanks for sharing.

I paid for my copy of Office 95. I can use it indefinitely.

Likewise, OpenOffice / LibreOffice doesn't charge me an usage fee. It doesn't nickel and dime me every year.

In contradistinction Office changes a fee over dumb shit such as removing the menu bar and replacing it with a ribbon. It WILL nickel and dime you every year even though 99.99% of the functionality most people need was available over 10 years ago.

But I guess you are too stupid to figure out how to stop paying for basic functionality over and over again every year.

Re:No surprise there

[raind]

True enough, but the old products don't play well with say Time Matters, or iManage if your a law firm. These firms pay crazy money for these apps and there a pita to support. Health care apps are another example, Cerner, etc.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

wow you are a fucking retard and to make matters worse you can't even do maths. those local sim cards you buy cost money and they DON"T GIVE INTERNATIONAL CALLS CHEAP RETARD. lets pretend they do though and say you spend $50 for a local sim for a month (which you wont get that cheap for international calls). So now your stand alone version of office cost you $650 plus the inconvenience of shopping for sims and you still haven't reached anywhere near feature parity yet. sadly their are a lot of fuckwits in the world like you that fail at maths.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey fuckwad, if you got out of your mother's basement and travelled, the second you get off an airplane at an international airport, there's kiosks selling local sim cards...targeted at tourists, they're not going to piss away the business selling something useless to their target customer. That means they have a ton of data. And you have facetime or skype or whatsapp or 1000 other free calling apps. Get a brain before you post, you moldy bucket of horse piss.

And there's no inconvenience. Literally 20 foot signs you have to walk within 10 feet of while getting your luggage. Every major international airport in the world. But why would a fucking brainless bucket of piss like you know anytihng about travelling even if you pretend you do. It's not your fault a bucket of piss doesn't get to travel.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're still acting like a few minutes of skype time bundled in makes office worth $100/year when there's 1000's of free alternatives. You really are a fucking braindead piece of shit.

Re: No surprise there

[Lost Race]

Johnny Tables reference

Did you mean Bobby Tables?

Re:No surprise there

[james_gnz]

Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

I'd agree it's like an income tax, but it's a regressive tax to an unelected organisation, and on top of that, everything you use it for can be monitored and controlled by them. It's not a decision I would want to make. I don't condemn you for it, given the circumstances, but I hope you recognise that the circumstances aren't ideal.

Re: No surprise there

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, the .DOC file hasn't changed significantly unless you count the changes explicitly designed to irritate consumers into upgrading. Bold, italics, and numbered lists all still work.

It's disgraceful someone is defending evil megacorporations that want to charge us way more for the exact same shitty product.

Re: No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

2 x 6.99 > 149? What spreadsheet did you work that out in?

Re:No surprise there

[AlanObject]

You DO realize there is a difference between Ownership, and Paying for a Service, right?

I do. Apparently you do not. I will try one more time.

I paid for my copy of Office 95. I can use it indefinitely.

Likewise, OpenOffice / LibreOffice doesn't charge me an usage fee. It doesn't nickel and dime me every year.

How much Cloud storage comes with your copy of Office 95? I get 1TB with Office 365 per user.

How many Skype-to-landline minutes do you get with your copy of LibreOffice? I get 60 minutes per user per month. That can save me about $300 per month in international calls when I travel overseas.

Online or on-phone tech support? You can buy that separately but now you are "nickel and dime"ed, right? Have your credit card ready. Maybe your time is worth $0/hour but mine is not. Even if I never use it it is still worth having as a form of insurance. You don't buy insurance because of you are certain to use it.

So you don't like the updates. Sure not everybody does but I interact with people who DO like them and DO use them and they pay me to work on their level, not to drag them down to your level. Features like online collaboration and new formats to import/export come to mind, but the bug fixes are probably more important. Not having to spend a half hour here and there resolving why a document appears this way here and that way there over the phone is more than worth the cost of the service all by itself.

Pro tip: if you are going to be so free with "you are an idiot" talk you should probably do a bit more reading first.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid, ignorant fuckwad. When you want to run Office, being forced to pay a monthly fee for skype minutes you don't want is not a feature. Being forced rent monthly could storage you don't want is not a feature. I've got cloud space though amazon prime I never use. The 5 gig I get from Apple may as well be unlimited, since I never use it either. MS storage is equally useless. But in your fucked up world of the demented its a good thing?

Phone support....yep that's something useful and worth paying a monthly fee for IN THE ENTERPRISE...WITH ITS OWN IT DEPARTMENT. Did your brain collapse into a singularity under the weight of its own stupidity. Or is your head a hard vacuum?

And, all of that is superficial garbage that has nothing to do with office itself, you're only proving that an old license of 2013, 2010, or even 2003 is better than the subscription, where you're forced to subscribe to all sorts of unrelated services.

Re:No surprise there

[Anonymous Coward]

> If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

Nah, this is too weak.

What about:

- Real men don't get things for free, they pay because paying is a very macho thing.

But most companies go for the traditional:

Those who can, pay the higher price; for others, the poor ones, there will always be free products.

I know those look and sound stupid, but it's amazing how many companies sell the same software repeatedly (or "rent"), how auto makers convince people that owning an expensive car will make them special, how some products make men believe they will be manlier if they pay more... *sigh*

And there's always the "you get what you pay for" mantra, which many fools assume is true, for the delight of those living off human naivete (without proper accents, because Americans are accent-impaired).

North Korea, China, and Donald Trump

[Rick Schumann]

I'm beginning to think that Microsoft is posting 'facts' like the people and governments in the subject line post 'facts'.

Re:North Korea, China, and Donald Trump

[__aaclcg7560]

It's called PR. If you write your PR release like a news article, some media companies will publish the PR under their own byline with a simple copy-and-paste and no further editing.

Re:North Korea, China, and Donald Trump

[Rick Schumann]

It's called PR. If you write your PR release like a news article, some media companies will publish the PR under their own byline with a simple copy-and-paste and no further editing.

..which is how people think so-called 'AI' is actual 'AI', and that by extension so-called 'self driving cars' are actually going to be a good thing instead of a disaster.

Re:Micro$oft $teal$ from the poor$

[Anonymous Coward]

your a doo$h

suckers

[Revek]

are born every second.

Not sure it will last...

[aaarrrgggh]

We switched to Office365 this month from 2010, and our end users are sick of it. They complain about re-authentication, along with bugs and other issues. Many people are switching back to our Google webmail instead.

For us, the price point is higher than where we want to be, given all the SaaS crap we are stuck with. I expect a defection inside a year.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[bravecanadian]

We switched to Office365 this month from 2010, and our end users are sick of it. They complain about re-authentication, along with bugs and other issues. Many people are switching back to our Google webmail instead.

You did it wrong.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You did it wrong.

Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. If their users are so unhappy with the change that they are making other arrangements, does it really matter? The result is still the same.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the displeasure of installing "365" on multiple computers, and the process is absolutely maddening. It craps out on creating the required account and sign-in, every single time, even when using internet explorer. The cdrom installation was a thing of beauty compared to this.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[aaarrrgggh]

We pay google and Microsoft slightly more than we would have for Microsoft alone, but we are not fully committEd to the MS absolution this way. Moving mail to MS would have been a painful process (total of about 1TB of mailboxes).

Truth be told, we did make some strategic mistakes that cost us some flexibility, but nothing too big.

Office365 is just a small hit; AutoDesk and Adobe (and engineering software) are where we spend real money.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[thegarbz]

They complain about re-authentication, along with bugs and other issues.

How did you / your IT department manage to break it?

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't do it right then. Thats not MS's fault.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anonymous Coward]

1 TB of mailboxes is nothing to be scared about presync it all with MigrationWiz and cut on a weekend.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say you switched, did you use a Microsoft Partner that knows what they are doing to switch and configured everything correctly? Almost no one is switching back to Gmail as it lacks features and most companies if done right love o365. I would suggest you contact a certified Microsoft Partner and have them fix it for you. While nothing is perfect, if done right o365 is awesome and works great. I have probably done 20 migrations to o365 from gmail,zimbra, notes and a lot more from Exchange and customers and their users are supper happy.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anne Thwacks]

1 TB of mailboxes is nothing to be scared about

I am sure someone@hackers.ru is thrilled with your attitude. I presume they don't have a "Data Protection Act" where you live.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Billly Gates]

We switched to Office365 this month from 2010, and our end users are sick of it. They complain about re-authentication, along with bugs and other issues. Many people are switching back to our Google webmail instead.

For us, the price point is higher than where we want to be, given all the SaaS crap we are stuck with. I expect a defection inside a year.

That means your IT department didn't update their DNS records to point to O365 or you have port 443 firewalled. This doesn't mean it sucks but rather your department screwed up.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anonymous Coward]

We switched to Office365 this month from 2010, and our end users are sick of it. They complain about re-authentication, along with bugs and other issues. Many people are switching back to our Google webmail instead.

For us, the price point is higher than where we want to be, given all the SaaS crap we are stuck with. I expect a defection inside a year.

What you have their is a really bad IT department, sadly it is common. We switched from google to O365, the users now would not go back to the bucket of shit that is google apps if you paid em.

Re:Not sure it will last...

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving mail to MS would have been a painful process (total of about 1TB of mailboxes).

1TB of mail isn't much to worry about. Between them our top 5 mailbox users receive more than 1TB of mail each fortnight.

Confirmed

[bravecanadian]

Microsoft is irrelevant and dying.. oh wait..

if you don't like it, *donate* to LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

If we want good, open, free alternatives, it helps a lot to donate to the projects.

I donate to Debian, KDE, LibreOffice, GnuPG, and more.

Even for OSS projects, being able to fund developers makes a big difference. Put your money where your mouth is. Stop giving money to Microsoft, start giving money to OSS. At least the latter will respect your rights (*) and not treat you as the enemy.

(*) insert systemd joke here.

Re:if you don't like it, *donate* to LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I donate bitcoins to The Pirate Bay so I don't have to pay for Microsoft Products.

So far I have donated over $8,000 worth of bitcoins.

Microsoft didn't get any of that money, but I have pirated Microsoft software on my computers. Suck on that, Microsoft!!

Re:if you don't like it, *donate* to LibreOffice

[thegarbz]

If we want good, open, free alternatives, it helps a lot to donate to the projects.

No it doesn't. The Office monopoly relies a lot on system integration with the rest of the business world. Lync, Outlook, Active Directory, Sharepoint, other DMS providers, integration with business software. For the MS side of the ecosystem no money is going to get them to open up those APIs to you. For the 3rd party side of the ecosystem only a huge user base will get them to open up to you.

Re:if you don't like it, *donate* to LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Lync and Outlook at work. To search my conversations with someone, I open two search windows. The first one is always blank, and populates only when I open the second. If I close either, the other becomes blank. Question mark?

Re:if you don't like it, *donate* to LibreOffice

[gravewax]

I really don't think they care, if anything you are helping to promote their software more, you obviously never intended to pay so at least you aren't supporting their competition.

Re:if you don't like it, *donate* to LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, no one here does that. Everyone here wants everything at no cost. Anyone who charges for what they do professionally is *stealing* and anyone with any money got it by scamming the system. But they still expect their parents to somehow pay the rent/mortgage, pay for school tuition and books, put food on the table, etc.

LibreOffice is superior

[Anonymous Coward]

It can do everything Office 365 can do, and more. It's also free.

If you really must have Office, just pirate it.

Re:LibreOffice is superior

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't even come close to doing what MS Office can do, Especially when it comes to Outlook and Excel. Telling people that just makes you look dumb when they try it and get disappointed. You should tell them it can do most of the basics of office and is great for home users and it can work for some very basic business users.

Not a sign of MS growth per se

[the_skywise]

My company and previous company switched to Office 365 only because it's easier to administer via the web interface than it is through the traditional profile/domain configurations. MS has touted that as cheaper to the company than boxed software which is true in the short term (the only thing that matters to beancounters anymore) but is a win for MS in the long term as companies continue to pay annual subscription fees (as opposed to holding off migrating to the next version of office) See Adobe moving all their software to annual subscriptions as well. Software "ownership" is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Re:Not a sign of MS growth per se

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Software "ownership" is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

That's the fear, but I'm not sure it's actually working out that way. It took what -- 2-3 years, maybe? -- from the Adobe CC switch for multiple credible competing products to be available for some of the big CS/CC applications. They aren't the same 800lb gorilla products, but rather like Google Docs compared to MS Office, they do enough for many users, and in some respects they might even be better.

Enterprise IT is often awful in terms of cost-effectiveness, because everything is worked out at a high level based on brand perception and support contracts and dare I say the odd dinner at the golf club. If they're foolish enough to pay through the nose and lock themselves into deals with specific software brands, so be it.

Smaller businesses tend to be much more price-conscious and much more nimble about their IT policies, and I see little evidence that they are keen to move to rental pricing as the default way of doing things. Where they do, it seems to be more the kind of online SaaS offerings that are attractive for whatever reason, not so much the software they used to buy but are now being asked to rent instead.

Re:Not a sign of MS growth per se

[jon3k]

If they're foolish enough to pay through the nose and lock themselves into deals with specific software brands, so be it.

To be honest the reason we lock ourselves into large agreements is to guarantee large discounts. It's typically not in the businesses interest to use their resources to constantly switch between providers. You can't move several thousand (or even hundreds, and maybe dozens) people between different SaaS offerings every year or two. Not only does this tie up your internal IT resources, you've got to retrain staff which is very expensive.

Re:Not a sign of MS growth per se

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sure, I understand that and it's a perfectly reasonable position if it genuinely does meet your business requirements better than any other available option. Presumably if and when you reached that "paying through the nose" stage, the balance would change and the costs of migrating to an alternative would look less prohibitive.

Unfortunately, while your reason is a good one, it is certainly not the only reason that big businesses lock themselves into these agreements. I've seen purchases made for corporate political reasons that were literally multiple orders of magnitude bigger than they needed be to meet the actual business requirements. Heck, in one case, I could have hired the necessary dev team and built the software involved from scratch for less money than was spent buying something off the shelf under... dubious... circumstances. That team would have delivered results sooner, too.

ownership...

[ole_timer]

you actually never owned the s/w - it's always been a rental - just look at the agreements in any EULA...all we've done is go to a monthly recurring model

Re:ownership...

[spire3661]

The physical discs the software came on had the full intrinsic value of the software on it and constituted 'ownership' of that copy. The game has changed now that there is no physical component. You are mis-characterizing the situation.

Re:ownership...

[ole_timer]

read the eula - you did not own the copy - you only owned the right to run it and make backup copies

AbiWord

[Anonymous Coward]

Before paying good money for a one year Microsoft subscription, take 15 minutes and try AbiWord. It is a GREAT word processor.

https://www.abisource.com/

It's free in every way, but if you feel a need to pay, give where your money supports a good cause. Don't be a chump!

The end is coming

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that MS got more revenue from Office 365 subscriptions, I think, is a sign that traditional licensing may come to an end for Office. It is an easy way to make more money, and people are going for it. MS might confident enough to pull the plug in the next few years.

The headline should read...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft Office Has Collapsed So That Even Office 365 Subscriptions Produce More Revenue Than Traditional Office Software Licensing"

Meanwhile, regular users happy with Google Docs and LibreOffice.

Re:The headline should read...

[Anonymous Coward]

considering their total revenue and profit also massively went up that title would make even less sense. What you would need to say is that despite competition MS continues to grow market share while google Docs and LibreOffice continue to struggle.

Well, of course you made more money this way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft, no shit you made more money this way.

You didn't give customers an actual choice, you fackin' wankers.

Post Ownership Society

[Anonymous Coward]

Face it, you don't need to own things.

You don't own your cellphone, you lease it for a small monthly fee.

Even if you "purchase it", you are only granted a limited license to use it, for limited usage, such as the owner of the software sees fit.

In the near future, you will not "own" your storage, you will simply use the cloud.

You will not "own" your formerly "personal" computer, you will lease a "computing appliance" for a small monthly fee.

Leasing means stricter control. Picture no viruses, malware, spamware, etc, because everything is tightly controlled.

They trick people into thinking Office 365 is real

[Anonymous Coward]

Only because they trick people into thinking Office 365 is real Office.

LibreOffice is way better. Everybody sane uses it.

This is smoke and mirrors...

[gosand]

Here is how you make revenue for Office365 go up - change your pricing.
I would venture that most of this comes from companies. They simply bundle the two together, of course requiring that you buy both. Maybe your costs are the same, or maybe they go up a little, but the ratio is probably heavily weighted towards office365. Microsoft can then say the revenue for 365 goes up, traditional license revenue goes down. But you still have to have both. Maybe they can push just 365 on new clients, but i think that would be a hard sell.

Then once their subscription numbers are up, they can just let the client-version wither and die.

At work we have Office365, but everyone I know uses the traditional installed version. It is buggier than it used to be, because it has to phone-home to mothership365. Store docs to OneDrive, view them in the cloud (which I never really do), or log in and use the 365 calendar/outlook, which I try to avoid at all costs. Many many times Office applications will hang now that they are 'integrated' with 365.

Nobody will care about 365 until they take away the client version, then productivity will tank. By that time though, the frog will be boiled.

Outlook? Thunderbird/Gmail/IMAP...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like Outlook is just a really crappy version of Thunderbird with a Gmail account and IMAP over SSL. I particularly like Gmail's anti-SPAM, the infinite email addresses via '+', and the way I can autofilter incoming emails to different folders.

OpenOffice & LibreOffice are just amazing!

It must be nice to have money you can throw away on Microsoft...

Nothing to see here

[zerofoo]

The move to Office 365 was entirely predictable as Office 365 is simply the next version of Office.

Any medium to large size enterprise that was using Office was already "renting" their software from Microsoft in the form of Software Assurance. Many businesses have become accustomed to annual license/support fees - from networking, to backup to productivity software - almost all of it in production in a decent size enterprise requires annual licensing and support.

Most enterprises that I've seen deploy Office 365 are deploying local copies of Office 2016 and taking great pains to prevent storage of their data in Microsoft's cloud.

This isn't some new paradigm shift to cloud/rental software - it's already been here for many years.

Re:Nothing to see here

[jon3k]

Sort of, the difference is you could always drop your SA if you needed to and you could carry whatever the current version of the software was. Now if you stop paying your business shuts down. Hopefully one day you're not trying to decide between paying salary or your Office 365 bill. Microsoft will be higher on your AP vendor pay list than the water bill. That's a scary thought.

WordPerfect Standard X8

[Anonymous Coward]

It fucking rocks.

It handles MS documents and PDFs with aplomb. Way better than LibreOffice.

It is CHEAP in comparison to MS Office, O365 or traditional install, like half the price or less.

It's fully backward/forward compatible for at least the last six versions, probably more. Meaning it's no problem to use WP5.1 documents within X8 and it is no problem to use X8 documents within X3.

Reveal codes!!! How does MS Office still not have this?

Economy

[hunter44102]

Guess what the first thing that will be canceled when the economy goes sour. Car payment or Office 365 payment?

In other words

[slashmydots]

In related news, the number of stupid people making decisions for their businesses is increasing. If my company had paid their rate for 365 since we bought office 2003, it'd be over $1000. We paid like $180 per seat.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Your company can fire halve IT department since less critical hardware needs to be taken care of.

People investing in their own demise

[evolutionary]

It's amazing how people will pour more money into speculation of profits through a method that screws the entire public (including themselves) because it will make them a little more money short term. (It's not like stock holders get a free subscriptions to Office 365).

There is of course LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org) as well as OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) and for those that want an internal intranet based solutions (or "cloud" on the open Internet) there is OnlyOffice (http://www.onlyoffice.org). I've used LibreOffice/openOffice for 5 years now and I have no complaints except for complex tables in the Spreadsheet application. Some have said that in other languages the grammar/spell check is incomplete but the public can always fix that if they are so inclined.

The best part: no spyware (MS is collecting the data from the installed clients as well as the Internet folks) and no lock in. Even no fees (but donations for the work would be nice folks). It's about time we started thinking outside the marketing box. There have been no serious function additions in years so this is just paying MS money we don't have to because we get too lazy to look for an option.(MS May try to block Libre/Office installs if it gains tractions however unethical (or even illegal it may be), but there is Linux or MacOs in that case)

Recurring Expenses

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.

What the hell does that mean?

If you want to be wealthy, play a good offence and a good defence. Maximize your earnings while eliminating as many recurring costs as possible. For instance:

-Cable Bills. Don't pay between $100 and $200 per month for TV. Put up an antenna. If you can't live without it, use a service such as NetFlix, Prime, or Hulu.
-Phone Bills. This includes cellular phone bills. Use Google Hangouts and web based services when possible. Use an Ooma for VOIP.
-Insurance. Shop around every year, but make sure that the agency is highly rated.
-Rent. Buy a house that you can afford and pay it off quick. Buying a home for 1/2 the price that the Realtor suggested and paying extra resulted in a 10 year mortgage. This has saved me over $700 per month for over a decade.
-Leasing. Buy a used car and pay it off quick.
-Debt. Don't run a balance on credit cards. If it can't be paid off in the next month, you can't afford it.
-Software. Use Free and Open Source software along with Web based apps for business. Nobody that I know can tell that I am using Linux when examining my work.

If you are typical business owner, remember that IT is an expense. Generally it does not add value to most products or services. You can save massive amounts of money and time by minimizing exposure to malware, scams, as well as many other trivial maintenance issues by not using Windows. The dirty little secret of IT technicians is that Windows always seems to need hand-holding to continue running.

Re:Recurring Expenses

[david_thornley]

Buying a home for 1/2 the price that the Realtor suggested

Buying low is good if you can find such a deal. Paying off the mortgage early isn't.

Right now, I owe a good deal of money on my mortgage, but the interest rate is significantly lower than my return on investments. (Tax considerations mean my actual return on investments is lower, but then so is the actual mortgage rate I pay, so it balances.) I'd be sacrificing money to pay it off early.

Predictable.

[westlake]

You just know how the Slashdot geek is going to respond to any post about Microsoft Office. So let us tick with the basics.

LibreOffice is the stand-alone office suite of the nineties, sans a broadly useful integrated messaging and calendar applications like Outlook .and Skype.,

Office 365 is an integrated office system with online and offline components and customized versions for federally compliant medical record applications and so on.

We switched to G-Suite... loving it

[Anonymous Coward]

We switched from in-house MS-Exchange and (crappy) SharePoint to Google's G-Suite for enterprise, so now have unlimited storage on Drive + plus MDM and video chat built-in.
The efficiency gains with Google docs (sheets, slides and docs) when co-authoring drafts or working on budgets is amazing.

We activated 2FA and some SAML integration with Salesforce. Since we sync/provision accounts within our internal AD, this works well when onboarding/revoking accounts for internal as well as third party Cloud solutions.
Bottom line, moving away from Microsoft was the best option for our company (with ~4000 staff in US, EU and Japan) all at a fraction of the cost for licenses for internally hosted Exchange (which lacks many of the other collaboration features we now get).

 

Re: We switched to G-Suite... loving it

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the costs for G-Suite per user? Also what mail client are you using (web?) the transition you described sounds almost exactly like a transition to Office 365.

Re: We switched to G-Suite... loving it

[Anonymous Coward]

The unlimited version of G-suite is $10/user/yr.

For most companies, the lower cost $5/users/yr is
The majority of users use Chrome for the default browser and the web interface for Gmail and Google drive use.
While some people have a need for MS-Office (generally office 2010), however, even they know how limiting (inefficient) MS-Office is compared to the collaboration capabilities within G-Suite.

The 80/20 rule

[rsilvergun]

is what makes Office so successful. It states that 80% of your users only use 20% of your application's functionality, but for each user it's a _slightly_ different 20%.

Basically, everybody has that one cool feature they can't live without that their entire workflow is dependent on (spacebar heating anyone?). That's how Microsoft gets lock in. You can't leave without taking a major hit.

You get more than just the software

[rsilvergun]

you get application hosting. You get apps that work as long as your web browser does, and if your web browser breaks you can wipe the computer and start over and not lose a damn thing. Yes, you're giving up privacy and control, but most people don't need that or care. They care about losing everything when they crash their PC for the 10th time. They care about spending $1k on a PC instead of $200 because then need a fractional amount more reliability.

You and I are computer enthusiasts to some degree. Most people view them as a means to an end and a rather annoyingly complex tool.

Re:You get more than just the software

[OrangeTide]

And I get to take the day off if I can't access the internet from my location. Where as with a traditional application I am forced to work even if reliable internet access is not available.

It's a better deal if you're a non tech

[rsilvergun]

because you break your computer a few times a year and it's expensive to fix it. Office 365 doesn't break unless your browser does. It works in 3 different browsers so if one breaks you can switch to another. And if all else fails you can switch computers and get to your files.

It's kinda like being a mechanic and driving a Jaguar. You can get away with it when you can fix it on your own.

Consistent with a Business focus

[Anonymous Coward]

When PCs and Very Small Minis (System 23s, Radio Shack Model 16s) first became common (a few years before IBM came out with The PC), a primary focus was bringing the computing in-house, where it would be under the control of the (usually small) business or individual. Networking PCs wasn't a Thing yet, though there were some networks around (I seem to recall Corvus or somebody like that networking Apple IIs to a huge (5 MB?) hard disk in an educational lab environment?). The small and Very Small mini's could sometimes handle a few VT100 (or the like) terminals for office automation. Otherwise, at the time, if you weren't big enough to have your own mainframe or large mini, you bought timesharing by the connection minute, CPU second, I/Os, and storage space. Even with the capital investment of buying the PC and related system stuff, and hiring or contracting for somebody to take care of it, you often came out ahead, or at least felt like you were.

Jump ahead 40 years. People are voluntarily downgrading their (now all networked) PCs to "thin clients" connected to datacenters and "the cloud" (other people's computers; functionally equivalent to timesharing). Why? Has the cycle gone completely around, to where nobody wants to have control over their processing and data any more, and is willing to pay for it in various increments of processor time and storage? What ever happened to the PC as a concept, not as just a small business machine marketed by IBM?

Re:Outlook? Thunderbird/Gmail/IMAP...

[Ol Olsoc]

Seems like Outlook is just a really crappy version of Thunderbird with a Gmail account and IMAP over SSL. I particularly like Gmail's anti-SPAM, the infinite email addresses via '+', and the way I can autofilter incoming emails to different folders.

OpenOffice & LibreOffice are just amazing!

It must be nice to have money you can throw away on Microsoft...

Some years ago, I became weary of Microsoft Office's inability to achieve cross platform compatibility between Macintosh and Windows, as well as MSO not being able to open older versions. So I decided to tryo OO. Documents on the PC opened properly on the Mac, and also Linux. So by that time the Ribbon had come out, and now the whole freaking interface was different between the Macs and PC's, and OO and AO would open word documents that MSO wouldn't any more.

The choice was obvious. Except for people that are not quite so concerned about actually doing work.

Office 365 lacks VBA

[GPS Pilot]

On PCs with Office installed, VBA is often the only programming language available.

Better than nothing for kids to play around with, like how they played around with QBASIC a generation ago.

Yes, you can create macros in LibreOffice too, but it's not as easy and performance is dog slow.

Re:Office 365 lacks VBA

[Anonymous Coward]

Office 365 supports VBA just fine. perhaps you are confusing the Office 365 as something that is cloud only, Office 365 is just the next version of office, it also has cloud apps but still has a full client side install that works perfectly for VBA

For me...

[antdude]

... I got Office 2007 Pro. from an estate sale almost a couple months ago. Before it and in the past, I was still using the very old 2K SR3 and 2003 from others who didn't use them anymore. They worked fine for my basic needs (Word and Excel) with their 2007 converter packs and updates. I also use the updated LibreOffice when needed too which is rare.

I hate the online cloud stuff especially when my Internet isn't reliable. Frak the online clouds and services. I still prefer to do stuff offline and locally!

It's ABUSIVE, not funny.

[Futurepower(R)]

"Funny thing is ..."

It's NOT funny. Microsoft has a LONG history of releasing buggy programs.

Microsoft fixed more than 2,403 bugs in Windows XP, before abandoning it.

Re: It's ABUSIVE, not funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

By 'abandon' do you mean releasing new long term service branches (ie Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10)?

Re:It's ABUSIVE, not funny.

[LynnwoodRooster]

Wow! A whole 2,403 bugs! If only they were as rock solid as Debian, with it's 80,000+ bugs.... Oh wait...

What this really means ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that from a macro viewpoint, the Microsoft vampire is sucking more blood ( $ ) from the global economy than ever while providing no more functionality to its hosts / victims. In other words the ecenomic efficiency of Microsoft's products just got lower.

From an actual editor

[mz721]

I'm currently working as an editor. Word is my main tool. And, I gotta say, Word's pile of crap, cloud or otherwise. It's crufty, it falls over, it's still lacking basic functionality like reveal codes and non-breaking character strings (\mbox{} if you know LaTeX). But since it is so embedded in the workflows of major organisations, it would take a nuclear crowbar to rip it out. For example, publication departments invest a lot of time and therefore money in developing pathways to take 'ing Word docs into 'ing InDesign with maximum preserved tagging. Their whole publications division centres on Word -- documents are prepared using custom styles (Word templates), proofed and collaborated over using Track Changes, checked using tools like Grammerly and PerfectIt. Equations are added in using MathType, and so on. Govt depts, businesses of all sizes, they've bought into the proprietary software toolchain from one end to the other. Microsoft and Adobe are the unholy duality. Word and InDesign. The clever thing is that 98% of users don't need 98% of what Word can do, and yet M$ has got them to buy it.

For 20 years, eternity in IT, the biggest competitor for Office has been previous versions of Office. M$ knew they had to move their customers onto a subscription model while they were still so dominant in the market, and they've done it.
Plenty of tools can do what Office does, sure. WordPerfect is still a great product; but nobody in business or govt (unless an OS enthusiast) is going to learn anything they don't have to. M$ relies on that inertia, and the investment already made in Word, and it's going to be a solid tactic for some time to come.

I will never rent software

[MpVpRb]

Never

What happens if you stop paying?

[hunter44102]

What happens if you miss a payment or stop all-together? Does the program stop working? I'm guessing the cloud storage might stop allowing new files but who knows

What is correct behavior?

[Futurepower(R)]

Vista had many problems, so many people paid a full price again for Windows 7.

If there are hundreds of millions of current users who lack technical understanding, should it be okay to stop maintaining the software?

Shrinking MS Office numbers passed by next MS...

[Anonymous Coward]

It eventually had to happen as sales of MS Office shunk and their massive marketing push of their online version( MS Office 365 ) took upgrades and pre-loads. it doesn't change the fact that the PC market has been shrinking quarter after quarter for a few years now and that means fewer MS Windows users.

How they are getting increasing revenue from a shrinking market share is interesting and eventually will fail. Eventually.

Fixes

[Futurepower(R)]

I meant fixes. Each update may have fixed several issues.

Re:Fixes

[LynnwoodRooster]

Ah, got it. So if the WinXP fixes each had 20 bug fixes, it would be on par with Debian. And that is terrible, just terrible!

Stockholm syndrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

Office users know no better and are convinced that they use 100% of office...

The real point to note

[eneville]

What I see is that MS have noticed the significant move to Linux/BSD and have lost a great deal of market as a result.

The business people at MS put their thinking caps on and saw a way to charge people for running Linux, and Azure is the result.

What I've not seen any mention of here, is that Azure itself runs on Linux. So this is a weird situation. MS are guaranteeing TOS for Windows in Azure, which is backed up by rock solid Debian[1] providing the network switching layer, which is much more critical than a single VM.

    1: https://www.theregister.co.uk/...