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Microsoft Says Price Increases Coming For Office 2019 and Windows 10 Enterprise Users (zdnet.com)
Microsoft has price increases in store for some of its Office and Windows customers as of October 1, 2018. From a report: In a July 25 blog post, Microsoft officials acknowledged the coming increases. Office 2019, the next on-premises version of Office clients and servers which Microsoft is currently testing ahead of its launch later this year, will see increases of 10 percent over current on-premises pricing. This price increase is for commercial (business) customers) and will affect Office client, Enterprise Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL and server products, officials said.
Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.
Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.
Microsoft can do this because they're a monopoly, which by definition has no serious competition. Sorry, but Linux just isn't up to the task of meeting the needs of most users.
Windows 7 is the Best Windows. , better than all versions which came before it and after it. The only thing it lacks is out of the box USB 3.0 support. The drivers not on the install disk but you ca add it.. That's all. It's everything you need.
Windows 8 was a stupid movie. "Let's change the UI, because, fuck it, let's change the UI." Nothing else.
And Windows 10 with its intrusive spying and adverts truly sucks ass. It didn't add anything of value either.
Microsoft is pushing out new versions because no one has gone for their subscriptions so new versions is how they make money. That is all.
> b0s0z0ku : Also, if you're not an idiot and don't go to random sites/click "run" on downloaded files, you're reasonably safe.
Wow. You really are an idiot. Precisely the sort of idiot who needs to be protected with security patches.
Funny. I don't see them jacking up the cost of the subscription service. Its still a good deal but I'm not to happy with them trying to force it on people.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Windows isn't as dependent to the institutions as they use to be.
Except for Windows Clients, you can have iOS, Andoid, ChromeOS, Linux, OS X as well that will just Citrix into that App or more often then not the applications are web based so you don't need windows for as much stuff.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Any price is good for other OS's, where the consumer price is $0.
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it's getting ridiculous.
I for one did not see that coming
I wish Excel got the same attention as the convoluted licensing models. Have you ever tried to open more than one file at a time in Excel? I have 4 monitors at work which make it easy to have source, destination, and documentation all visible at the same time with most programs. But Excel is autistic.
And have you ever tried to make a quick CSV file? Check out this level of autism:
*Begin saving file*
The selected file type does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets.
Expected warning, though the default in Excel is to create a new workbook with multiple sheets. How arbitrary.
Google Sheets does not have this problem, nor default to more sheets until you need them
Book1.csv may contain features that are not compatible with CSV.
Fair enough, though this delay occurs every single save which means they aren't even trying to see if such features even exist.
Google sheets does not have this problem
Now I am done, so it is time to close Excel and be on my merr...
Do you want to save the changes you made to Book1.csv?
I thought I just saved them? It's not like I hit an export button like in Gimp or Photoshop.
Book1.csv may contain features that are not compatible with CSV.
ARE YOU SERIOUS? The SAME message again?
HAR HAR!
For large documents TeX is a very good alternative, especially if you have many people who must work together on the same document. The initial learning curve to TeX may seem to be steeper than Word, but you'll notice the slopes of the curves aren't so different between the two if you've ever tried to learn proper hotkeys in Word or hack around some auto-formatting feature that is slowing you down. I think a 2 hour web-seminar on TeX could get people up and going pretty reasonably.
LibreOffice is good for all that miscellaneous business shit. The spreadsheets are good but easily a generation behind the capabilities of Excel. It's a trade off, manage thousands of licenses or use some free software that a large percentage of the time works just as well. Businesses rarely choose the top-of-the-line anything, so making do with something inferior is standard operating procedure.
Wikis like Mediwiki, Confluence, etc can be a better way to log and share some types of company knowledge than documents. And the syntax is easy, although the formatting is less capable than a proper WYSIWYG editor.
Windows 7 not having SP3 lead to long updates times.
I gotta say, Microsoft has been doing a superb job lately with all their Linux promotion efforts! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Menawhile, Libreoffice remains free.
This will have zero impact on Linux. This is enterprise pricing. If I go to my employer and suggest that we not pay the increased fees and switch to Linux my employer will ask me "How much will that cost and/or save?" As soon as that conversation starts the heads of everyone in the room will start to spin.
Sent from my TARDIS
Imagine back in the 90s you wrote Linux drivers and file converters for OpenOffice/LibreOffice. But no you decided to take the easy route and now your paying the Microsoft tax with added telemetry.
Our company uses Office 365 and Microsoft hosted Exchange email. The hosting part isn't so bad, really. Yeah, it gets really expensive when you have a lot of mailboxes -- but it works far better than the 3rd. party Exchange hosting services we used or considered previously. (Many of the remaining Exchange mail hosts are really "legacy" providers who still have enough clients so it doesn't make sense for them to shut down operations yet. But they're typically still using an older version of Exchange server that's not fully compatible with the latest features in Outlook, and won't give you as much flexibility to change things in the admin control panels as Microsoft does on their own service.)
What drives me crazy though is how the Office 2016 for Mac and Windows code-base was so lacking in features. We paid a lot of money to upgrade to it via O365 subscription vs. using our existing Office 2011 for Mac and 2013 for Windows licenses. And it felt like we lost as many features as we gained with it. Until pretty recently, Microsoft didn't even put back features as basic as allowing images to be inserted in headers or footers of Excel documents! They also broke a lot of font format related stuff on the Mac side, because they decided to scrap the old way of using a proprietary font rendering engine that was part of the code in Office 2011 and earlier, in favor of using native OS X font rendering functionality. I think this was a good move, except people's carefully crafted Outlook message signature lines got mangled and needed to be re-worked.
I'm sure we'll pay the asking price and migrate to Office 2019 eventually, since we're pretty committed to the whole Office suite after over 15 years of employees using it for the majority of our corporate documents and messaging. But I'd really like to see Microsoft do better about not subtracting features that used to work in old versions of the software and charging us money to do it!
Nothing to see here.
And copyright is nothing but a monoply.
An imaginary* one, granted, but a monopoly.
There is no competition on this exact something. So they can pick arbitrary prices, only limited by what the victims can be made to pay. Not in any way related to actual worth. Neiter to the victim nor to the criminal. A great example of how markets aren't free because for-profit organizations don't want them to be, and correct, non-lobbyist-driven regulation is (or should be) there to keep the market free.
(* Imaginary, because there are ways to make it completely impossible to enforce the monopoly. Like everyone who shares it behind your back keeping it secret from you. And even ways to make it /physically/ impossible, without breaking causality.)
A two-hour seminar for making templates and getting me started, that enables me to easily look up the rest on a need-to-know basis.
I think the main thing holding TeX back, is the lack of good and *short* introductions. The initial treshold is far too high. One is expected to just invest serveral days off the cuff. Which is as painful as quickly accelerating from 0 to 25mph with a bicycle. Nobody wants that.
Tha whole "training" meme is pure MS FUD. Nobody need training to use something so damn similar to Windows that you can put a different theme on t and n00bs wil not be able to tell.
It's not like they know much about Windows anyway. You still close and open programs and windows the exact same way. Files are also trivial for an elementary school kid. And Libreoffice is even easer to use for the older employees.
Sure, you need to fire your Windows admins, and hire some with a clue, which costs a bit. But the ease of administration and freedom to customize to business needs far outweigh that after the first year. (If not, your admins were bad ones and need to be replaced.)
Perhaps you feel unfairly treated? .....
I am altering the deal... Pray I don't alter it any further.
But they will, they will.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's free and it fills all my needs.
I understand the need to have word if you are at an office that has word.
But ... when I was I bought full Office 2010 for $10.
And I've never used it at home. Just wasn't necessary.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The threat to Microsoft isn't from directly losing customers... The real threat is investments in not Microsoft over time eroding Microsoft's default position. Investments driven by excessive greed and lack of integrity (e.g. Windows 10 is malware).
Does anyone really give a shit about any new office feature introduced since circa 2010? Good enough is coming soon enough.
I asked once someone with a permanent position at cern, why do they have so great ties with MS, when they (back then it was SLCE) can even have their own distro, with collaboration ofc with other labs like Fermilab?
Why can't they just take a stack of the public money they give to MS for various shitty services, like skype for business, and give it one year to libreoffice and ask them to add X functionality if needed and with the rest just polish the suite?
Why don't they do the same with a chat/video conferencing client?
Why don't they do the same with every small or large piece of S/W they use?
Why can't this be done in universities?
Why can't this be done by governments?
Where are the "good", wealthy and least corrupted countries in those things?
"hey man, we need 6 gorillion Euros each year for office suites and windows licenses. What do?"
and the answer is always, keep paying,
because your useless, uneducated public employee gets upset if the buttons on his office suite changes colours or position.
Visio is just as bad, they need more money to fix their horrible products
No matter how many options are available every user I've dealt with demanding MS Office has always uttered the phrase "this is what I was trained on". People's dependence isn't always about features, it's about what they're comfortable with. Since they were trained on it through High School and College they pretend they can't learn anything else. I've done some Libre Office deployments in factories and had some great success but I was always stopped short of complete replacement by the people who "where trained on it" so that's what they need.
I think Microsoft knows very well it is in a position that it can do this without question to enterprise. I know of very few companies who would even consider anything other then Office from Microsoft. I myself as a casual user of a office suite could get by with a Open Office or Libre Office suite.
.. to actually own your software, there is little stopping the proverbial landlord from raising your rent once you're nice and comfortable in your apartment. So to speak.
Check your premises.
So now that Microsoft is buried balls deep in your company, they're vigorously driving home the point that you now have a business partner whether you wanted one or not. And this one has no responsibility whatsoever to you or your business.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Rather than fixing the root problem: the Windows Kernel can't be patched while running; they're sticking Band-Aids and gimmicks on the problem.
Windows 7 is just Vista with more lipstick. A painful turd if you ever tried a proper shell / window manager / package manager / ...
If two people job share (eg one mornings, the other afternoons) and they thus sit at the same desk and use the same PC: is the cost twice $84 per year ? If so: why ?
yep
Businesses DO save a lot by using LibreOffice.
But most businesses are led by PHBs who like what they are used to, and defend it precisely because they are as clueless as they are pussies. And then there is the MS fearmongering targeted at them every time they renew contracts or open their news sites. Resulting in very sluggish changes. But they do happen, as can be seen in the dominance of Linux on servers.
There have not been any meaningful new features in these office suites for a loong time. Most of them have been stolen by MS anyway, and others, including LibreOffice's commercial ancestor, had them first and did them better.
Butnthe "re-training costs" and "compatibility problems" memes are the best. They repeat them like mantras.
*While* MS Office updates *also* require considerable training for those robots that can't handle what they haven't memorized, every time the MS management decides a new design is needed to justify a new version.
And LibreOffice actually is better at opening old MS Office documents than recent MS Office itself.
So: Get real.
LibreOffice, OpenOffice... you say "yeah but it's not fully compatible with MS Office". This is the problem. Start using standard stuff, and everything is to be compatible. Some excel fonctions / macros only exist on MS? Don't use it.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
On a 4 year old laptop running Outlook 2013, searching for messages was done in a reasonable amount of time. Now on a new laptop with Outlook 2016, searches are extremely slow.
Trump to hang for treason.
Just give the whining, it's become boring. You lost.
Windows 10 is a pain in the ass. Don't get me wrong, it's a stable and decent OS but I get infuriated when MS pushes an update and I find that system settings that I changed on purpose are turned back on. FUCK YOU Microsoft! From an update standpoint I updated all my users workstations to win 10 but I don't use that shit at home.
One necdote doesn't make a spring, but personally I've spent less time on that from OO/libre to Office (and back again) than I have between different versions of the latter.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How many remember when MS Word's new format was not compatible with the old format, once a team member opened a file with the new version of Word and saved it, no one else in the organization could use it because they were using the old version of MS Word.
Good example where, collaboration or not, Microsoft was not compatible with itself, much less other open source alternatives to Word.
Pretty short term problem, as MS did ship compatibility filters for Office 2007+ formats for older versions of Word. Yes, interoperability between versions, particular from the transition from doc to docx was problematic, and I'd say 95% of the time OpenOffice/LibreOffice can handle MS's file formats. The problem is the 5%, and that's where our problems stemmed from. In the end, everyone was upgraded to Office 2010, which still does handle the newer variants of OOXML found in Office 2013 and 2016 without much of a hitch. In the end, whether we liked it or not (and we don't, Office is bloody expensive in any enterprise environment no matter how you slice it), unimpeded work flow is far more costly. If LibreOffice could ever get sufficient penetration to force more effort at interoperability, then we'd review it, but for now, Microsoft has us pretty firmly embedded in their ecosystem (and like I said, it's not like I like it, particularly as the newer subscription model feels more like being held hostage).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.