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Office 365 Growth Opportunity 'a Lot Bigger Than Anything We've Achieved', Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says (cnbc.com)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday suggested that Microsoft could grow more from its Office 365 line of cloud productivity apps than anything in the company's 43-year history. From a report: With business editions of Office 365, Microsoft faces competition from Google, as well as younger players like Box and Dropbox, in the race to get companies collaborating in apps running on remote cloud servers. "The growth opportunity for what is Office 365 is a lot bigger than anything we've achieved, even with our high penetration in the client-server world," Nadella said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco. When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss at the event. Microsoft recently introduced the Microsoft 365 bundle, which includes Office as well as Windows, along with enterprise security and mobility services. Nadella also talked up the company's potential in the Azure public cloud infrastructure business, where it competes with Google as well as Amazon Web Services. "We had a good business in our server business, but this business is orders of magnitude bigger than what used to be a successful server business," he said.
Subscription model is user abuse. Well done.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
This is truly an excellent opportunity to make money off of charging people a monthly fee for what used to be a fairly affordable one-time purchase. Sad that the big thing Microsoft is pumped about is a stale word processor and spreadsheet package. Satya's idea of innovation is a payment plan almost nobody actually likes.
'When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move"'
Instead of paying the once for the software, you'll be paying a yearly rent into perpetuity. Does anyone here remember when this was a technology forum?
I used open office for several years and it closed on functionality.
Then there was the kerfuffle and I switched over to LibreOffice.
I have a legit full license to Microsoft office 2012. I never use it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I use LibreOffice... 90% of the functionality at 0% the cost. Suck on this, M$.
Unsubscribe.
Rent-seeking.
Yep. The only real message in that headline is that it's overpriced.
No sig today...
You always said but i need that one feature or that one closed data format. Now you are in the extinguish phase of EEE. Same goes for gimp vs photoshop who is also now a subscription.
When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss
What is means: We were foolish to have sold perpetual licenses for just a one time hit. People who can move out have already moved out of MsOffice. Those who have not moved out, could not so. So we have them by their balls. We are going to make them all pay month after month to get access to their own data. Dont worry about users holding on to their old licenses. We make life hell for them, and they will eventually succumb and move to cloud and pay us our due share, our daily bread. It might be their data, but they stored it in our formats. Now they are our prisoners, we will never release them, but continue to bleed them dry.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A sucker is born every minute. I haven't used MS Office since the cloud bullshit. Office Libre or Open Office for me.
I refuse to buy subscription software. I'm sure its a win win for macroshaft though.
Next up: Windows 10
Pretty soon there's going to be an "Insert credit card to continue" nag screen on every Windows 10 machine.
No sig today...
Mine has been trying to connect for the last 30 minutes without success. This happens often everyday.
We used to be engineers during the early days of Slashdot. We have all now been promoted to the management.
They dont rent software.
Especially when I like Open Office better.
Affordable? MS Office for businesses was $700-1200/user depending on your licensing model and often you didn't even get CAL's for your Exchange and other servers, even the home edition was like $100-200. Even if you had 10,000 licenses or more, you still were on the hook for ~$2-3M/year for Microsoft licensing.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You never paid once for Ms office. Not since it went to windows
You paid $350 every 3-6 years or you got lucky and got a three year with your $1500 new computer that was also replaced every 3-6 years.
You always paid for office. Now you pay byonth or year for it. It works. It also allows rivals to slip in as you start charging enough that instead of a once every thing 3-6 year write off able expense it is a recurring expense. And reoccurring expenses are the first to get trimmed.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Sad that the big thing Microsoft is pumped about is a stale word processor and spreadsheet package.
Satya will fix that when he has enough users running cloud software with any component that resides on a PC being frequently updated. Release a whole bunch of ''improvements'' that just happen to require a change to the file format - things that really matter ... thus making problems for Libreoffice. 6 months later once Libreoffice has caught up; do it again; then again. Eventually most people will give up with Libreoffice. Yes: the EU will sue Microsoft and say that its file formats must be documented, but in a fast moving environment the competition will never quite get the opportunity to catch up.
Obviously you never bought Office.
A year of O365 is around $100. A full blown standalone version of Office (yes, you can buy those, the cards actually are right where the O365 cards are - look carefully and you'll find them) is around $3-400.
If you're a student, it's around $80 and you get a pile of more benefits, namely the $80 gives you 4 years of O365.
And the Office you get from O365 is good on 5 PCs (and 5 "other devices"), while the standalone Office is good for one PC only.
Yes, the Office is the same - you download the same software and can use it offline. Though the O365 version comes with cloud storage, which for 99% of home users out there, is essential as it'll be backed up automatically.
So yes, they do make O365 quite attractive - especially for home. You get the latest version of Office, you can run it on 5 separate PCs and given there's a new version every few years, it costs around the same.
And like I said, you can still buy the standalone version if you want. Just don't try to install it on more than 1 PC at a time.
Pretty Please. I want to see that while I'm still around.
A client had *months* of problems because of them constantly screwing around with their licensing back end. It needs to stop.
Check eBay for 5 computer Office licenses for some $40.
I’m fed up of Mo$illa (notice the dollar sign) messing up the browser. There must be a payment from ad tracking companies to cripple something as critical as cookie management in this way.
Join the resistance, switch to Waterfox or even Pale Moon.
I understand the "renting software" argument, from a personal individual perspective. I have and previously only used LibreOffice. But not anymore..
Now I have a personal Office 365 subscription, not for Office, but for OneDrive storage specifically. I love OneDrive and the features and interface it offers. The fact that MS Office software is included is the BONUS for me, and increases the value of my subscription.
Now for businesses, Office 365 is a no brainer. For what you get, and you do get a lot, the value proposition is excellent.
If you think an Office 365 subscription is just for MS Office, then you're either missing out on 80% of the other features, or you don't need those features and therefore are not Microsoft's target audience for the platform.
Good on Microsoft for creating a platform of services that integrates well and helps enable businesses from small to large.
...at one of the biggest companies in the world.
I'm an IT supporter there, and we're currently drowning in migration issues from the old system to o365. Profiles messing up, shared mails not working properly, license issues prohibiting our users from reading the mails and thus working. Literally thousands of calls, hundreds just at my department every day about Outlook o365 migration issues.
Get it working before you brag!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
'When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move"' Instead of paying the once for the software, you'll be paying a yearly rent into perpetuity.
Most large businesse have/had a subscription, which cost quite a bit. Also, the O365 for business subscription cover a lot more than traditional Office. And nobody prevent you from purchasing the traditional licenses.
> You get the latest version of Office
And that's the problem. 2013 was recently removed as a download option which means you can no longer run Office on anything but 7 with the latest SP and later. The next version of Office that is going to be released and that will be the only allowed version to install from Office 365 will only work with 10.
Outlook 2007 can't even connect to outlook.office.com any longer. Microsoft dropped support for it last November and about a month ago, our users were no longer allowed to connect.
Office 365 is a disaster unless you run the newest version of Windows and are willing to stay on the upgrade carousel. We can't since most of our customers use older versions of IE.
We migrated to Office 365 last week. Most people still can't read email despite the fact we hired someone Microsoft recommended to help. The company is named SkyKick, and their office is near us here in Seattle. They were nice enough to send someone to our office to try to help, but I don't think they've been able to get anyone working yet. They seem sharp, but the migration has been a disaster.
That sure sounds like what I've heard from Baptist Preachers.
Oh we've had a good time! Weee've had good times!
Keep following our path and we'll see the promise land of plenty.
There are glorious opportunities there and better times than we've ever had can be seen.
So follow us and we'll take your money and we'll be rolling in the rewards of those promises.
At least it sounds like your AD is syncing so you can login in the first place! For us, new accounts don't start working usually until over a week has passed and password changes can take days. You have to annoyingly remember to use your old password with Office 365, but then when it updates, you often shoot yourself in the foot by using your old password and disabling your account because of too many failures.
MS has always been a "subscription" service. Even though you used to make a one-time payment for a particular version, getting upgrades to be compatible with everyone and everything around you was a de-facto subscription.
Since subscriptions will typically be bought for about 2 years' worth, it's not much different than the old way of paying every 3-to-5 years for an upgrade.
However, the utility of the old version generally gradually "rotted" instead of having the plug suddenly pulled when the subscription expires. However, I suspect MS will offer a grace period for bigger orgs such that a nag message gradually grows more annoying over time, possibly with a delayed late-fee. Diminishing compatibility and nag messages are roughly comparable in pain.
MS cannot make subscriptions too annoying, otherwise too many customers will bolt for alternatives. However, if one day they get into a financial funk, they could turn to milking current customers for as much as possible via strict terms, and sell out their longer future to survive the short-term. Remember when IBM went through a bean-counter fad where instant-profit was more important than customer good-will?
Table-ized A.I.
Did you use their "Outlook Assistant" program? From what I can tell, it doesn't work at all. We had to manually create new profiles when we moved to O365, and with our slow Internet connection at work, it looks like it will finish downloading email for everyone sometime about the end of August.
You're holding it wrong.
Nice thing is that you can whitelist with local storage. Non-US IPs aren't connecting from outside.
An I get a *TON* of inquires from employers all over the US about it, even though I've been on perm disability for the last 2 years.
An hindu chimp trying to rip people off. Shocked, shocked I am.
Does anyone else gasp in ore at how many of these fuckheads have made it to top position's in American business?
The biggest problem with o365 is you have to use it. I pity the fool.
Clearly you're not up to the task. You should leave those things to professionals, instead of meddling in things you do not understand. I don't believe for a second that you work at "one of the biggest companies in the world", because real companies have outsourced IT a long time ago. Only two-bits small businesses with bad managers still have an IT department. You obviously work at one of these and have no professional credentials whatsoever.
Sounds like someone did a super shitty job configuring AD Connect. Maybe revisit that?
...and often you didn't even get CAL's for your Exchange and other servers....
CAL's were my first major indicator back in the late 80's/early 90's that Microsoft's customers really were stupendous morons. They paid a TON of money for software they weren't actually allowed to use in any meaningful respect.
Microsoft: That will be $1200, please.
Customer: How many users will your software support?
Microsoft: That depends on how much more money you pay us.
Customer: What? I just paid you $1200!
Microsoft: You paid for the right to pay us, not for right to use the software.
Customer: Oh, okay. How much more may I pay you?
Microsoft: How much do you make? Send it in.
Customer (singing): Everything is Awesome!
And now, the modern subscription scam just reconfirms it all.
And if you are a student taking certain "IT" courses (ie, any programming, networking, or desktop/server OS class at the tech college I work for) and you can download ISOs and a personal license key (not time limited, etc) for the OS, Office, Visual Studio, etc. via MS "Imagine". Tuition for that one course would be about $300 for an in-state resident...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Microsoft Toolkit 2.6.3 does not seem to understand what "subscription" or "payment plan" means.
For me, at least - I don't use MS Office, and couldn't care less about it. I have been able to use other tools for many years, without any problems whatsoever. And producing more professional-looking documents to boot: most MS Office documents that I have seen look pathetically MS Office.
What is your problem with O365? We moved ~5000 global users out of Exchange and into Exchange Online over a year ago at this point and it works great. We have a pretty complex Active Directory forest, with multiple domains.
Sounds like you guys borked your transition. The technology itself is solid. Way better than managing the Exchange infrastructure ourselves.
We did a phased rollout over the course of 18 months.
We all gasped in awe at the ironic ore you mined right there.
Not at all. Slashdot helps spread information. For instance has anyone asked why office360 is taking off? Not good marketing, but fear. All those people hanging on to office2007 got informed it is end of life on that product so upgrade or get hacked.
Don't be so sure. I worked for one of the 5 biggest IT companies, and they thought Lotus Notes was an enterprise email solution. Maybe if they had at least out-sourced management it may have kept running all week long.
Not only is it unlikely that he works for one of the biggest companies in the world, even if he does, they are blowing it big time.
We are only a mid-sized enterprise with ~5000 licenses from Microsoft. They have a whole squad of employees dedicated to our account. We have dedicated engineers and support escalation matrixes for the major technologies that we use (Skype for Business, O365 / Exchange and Azure). Anything I need a resource for, I can just email our account rep and he gets me connected with someone who actually knows what they are talking about. If we open a support ticket and are not happy with engineer assigned to it, we contact our support rep and she starts rattling cages.
When we did our O365 / Exchange migration, we had weekly meetings with Microsoft engineers and account reps to make sure that things were going well. It was all included "for free" as part of our enterprise agreement. I do not know how MS treats other clients, but they want us to succeed. Maybe it is the markets we are in, or the clients we work with, but they really treat us like a showcase for their technology. We have also been in a couple of Azure "Preview" programs for various technologies (mostly around backup and SQL), and their product managers are extremely receptive to feedback and product enhancement ideas.
Got acquired to a company that is a big Microsoft fan. They went whole hog with the Office 365 and other online compnaies, and now all our services are now in the cloud. All the security training about being wary of third party sites goes out the door when you've now got everything as a third party site using single sign-on.
It was bragged at a training for Office 365 that the new mothership company uses that it was only $17/mo per user.
Of course, they could save money by also not making it mandatory to upgrade Office every time there's a new and broken version. MS Office got "good enough" twenty years ago. If they had only stuck wot bug fixes and performance improvements since then it would have been an awesome product by now. Instead it's gotten worse and is the primary source of profanity in the workplace.
Office is basically the only top ranked or great Microsoft product. Everything else is third or fourth place ranked in terms of quality.
What used to take several days (normally) to several months (when under audit) is now literally a few minutes work at any time.
It is significantly easier to justify costs to the CFO when it comes to budget time - $X/user times number of users.
You bet I like an annual user subscription cost with automated federated user management to O365 portal. When you're already paying for an enterprise agreement, the cost increase to change to subscription models vs the reduced compliance effort is a no brainer.
Don't be so sure. I worked for one of the 5 biggest IT companies, and they thought Lotus Notes was an enterprise email solution.
To be fair, it wasn't that bad at email, especially if you were owned the platform, ie: IBM. It was used a fair bit in the enterprise before Microsoft had Outlook ready in '97.
Satya's idea of innovation ...
Microsoft's idea of innovation has for a long time consisted in changing the colour scheme and making changes to ensure incompatibility; and adding features that look impressive. Personally, I use LibreOffice - not just because it is good enough for my needs, but also because I have now got a routine of rescuing my friends and family from disasters they have got into in MS Office. The problem is that all these oh-so-clever features in MS Office allow the casual user to do things that they don't fully understand the consequences of, so that when they later try to reformat things, the document doesn't behave as expected. LibreOffice is perhaps less 'innovative' - or less permissive, in that it stops you from doing many stupid things.
Some of the things I have had to repair are bizarre - I once came across a table that seemed to consis of several, overlapping tables side by side. I can't even imagine how such a thing can be made - a table should just be a table, in my view, but there you are.
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
Or, you know, you could realize that the "glowing box with moving pictures on it that dumbs you down" isn't an absolute requirement to fill your life.
Watching series or movies, no matter where from (/HBO, Netflix, whatever) isn't the only form of entertainment available to humanity.
You could also go out more and do some outdoor activity. /. and basement dwellers.
Yes, I know,
But doing some outdoor exercise could be also good for your general health, extend a bit your life expectancy and even more increase your quality of life.
(And there are a lot of simple out-door activities that costs a lot less than a gym/fitness membership, and certainly a lot less than any TV-media combination).
Yes, some people are replacing cable TV with an almost cable-TV-like situation, where the only advantage is to be less at the mercy of a single local monopolies, but a few competing companies with differing content.
But other people just wax their skis and go to have fun on the snow in the Alps.
(DISCLAIMER: I live on the European side of the Atlantic pond, where cable didn't have such a huge success as in the US, and where there's even a significant choice of totally free TV/Radio media - either off-the-air (DVB-T), or (in bigger cities) relayed un-encrypted for free on you appartment's cable antenna connection port, even if you don't subscribe to any cable company at all.
We aren't as much cable cutter as we didn't have that many cables to cut to begin with).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, the Office is the same - you download the same software and can use it offline.
It's also worth noting that the O365 subscription gives you access to the Windows, Mac, Android and iOS versions. Unfortunately, my employer set it up in a stupid way. If I use the web version then I'm redirected to a web page run by our org that handles the authentication, but for the mobile apps I have to type in my credentials directly to the app (which is then sent to our servers for authentication). This would be fine, except that they don't let me set a different password for that and the systems that give access to a bunch of information that is considered highly confidential and where I'd probably be breaking the law (GDPR) if I provided the password to Microsoft.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Now. now, be kind. It may just be the mysterious case of a network error.
Not only do you need an evil data-slurping / data-perv Microsoft account but if you now disable the Officeruntoclick service, no office products will run!
They've turned Windows 10 in to a user-hostile, untrustworthy worrisome piece of advertising garbage that it's unusable not just because of that but because it's so poorly layed out. Hot keys don't work any more, that stupid metro interface doesn't flow well and finally the Microsoft store is only a mechanism for evil greed and user-control / data-perv style slurping.
Isn't it funny how the naysayers kept saying that OpenOffice/LibreOffice was a non-starter because it didn't have 100.000% compatibility with data exported from MS Office ... but the very same people think Office 365 is wonderful, and its compatibility is *way* worse?
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"We can't since most of our customers use older versions of IE."
Time to roll out a deprecation and upgrade notification.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Has the market expanded, or has MS just figured out better ways to fleece their sheep?
It doesn't seem like there has been much of a market expansion for Office-like software since maybe the mid-2000s. So, where does all of this optimism come from if not the realization of new and better ways to squeeze their existing flock.
A company that I'm consulting for currently has 28 e1 licenses. They pay nearly $300 a month. The only feature they use is email. That's it. They are paying far too much.
I'm setting up (currently nearing finalzation and runs well) a Linux postfix email server with dovecot (imap and pop3), spam assassin, virus scanning, backup, a additional web interface, all without local accounts. The server is configured to handle multiple domains.
In my own business I have this set up with it constantly running for the past few years with only minor problems typically requiring only a reboot to resolve.
It took a few days to set up and has been in testing for a couple of weeks, but it will save the small business thousands of dollars a year and require little to no maintenance.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.