Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019 (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft today launched a marketing campaign pitting Office 2019 and Office 365 against each other. The goal? To prove Office 2019 isn't worth buying -- you and your company should go with Office 365 instead. In a series of three videos, twins Jeremy and Nathan calculate the differences in Excel, Cynni and Tanny present their findings in PowerPoint, while Scott and Sean type it out in Word. The ads are cringe-worthy, to say the least, but they do get the point across.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
When Microsoft announced Office 2019 in September 2017, the company said the productivity suite was "for customers who aren't yet ready for the cloud." And when Microsoft launched Office 2019 in September 2018, the company promised it wouldn't be the last: "We're committed to another on-premises release in the future." And yet, Microsoft would much rather you join the ranks of Office 365's 33.3 million subscribers. If you must, Office 2019 is available for purchase. But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy.
I will then not give you any money, for there is no way in hell I am going to pay you a recurrent subscription.
Gee, Software as a Service, aka monthly software rental fees, where Microsoft can nickel and dime you every month is a surprise?
The entire software industry is moving this direction. Adobe, JetBrains, etc.
Why is this news?
actually neither are worth buying for probably higher than 90% of people.........libreoffice all the way
They DMCA people for hosting office 2000 but not 97 or earlier, meaning that 2000 is good enough for people. If you're not doing complicated macros and formulas, you have plenty of legal open source alternatives.
If a customer BUYS your software, then you get paid once but you still have to support it for years.
If the customer RENTS your software, Software-As-A-Service, you get them to keep paying you annually or even monthly.
Kind of a no-brainer for Microsoft, really. An owned copy of the software costs what, $200-$250? They keep you subscribed for two and a half years and that's covered. Relatively few people will BUY new software every year when the old versions work just fine, so you absolutely make more in the long run through subscriptions.
=Smidge=
Or LibreOffice. Either do a nice job for most folks.
TeX for the rest of us that need to publish or write very technical detail-oriented documents with multiple authors.
I doubt they will release it.
Just force you to use the shitty 365.
And people will eat it up. They already have enough idiots that have bought. Now that will get the rest.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
31 years and you still can't get it right? You would think at some point you would arrive. Guess with Microsoft it's, "a work in progress."
"But Office 365 is really what the company wants you to buy."
Buy? They don't want you to buy anything, they want you to rent it.
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Libre Office
Apache Open Office
Softmaker Freeoffice
WPS Writer
Abiword
TextMaker
Pages (for Mac)
Atlantis Word Processor
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Seriously. Why would I ever *want* this cloud bullshit? Even if we disregard all the horrible security and privacy problems, what is the actual *upside* that is so appealing? I simply don't understand it. There is no upside.
But unfortunately for us the "march of progress" is pretty much forcing us to upgrade, even when the existing copies of Office 2003 and up work just fine.
We looked at going to Office 365 and the pricing looked good... until we found that needed functionality cost extra. We would end up paying more in less than 2 years going with Office 365 instead of Office 2019. And we would keep paying that out, year after year. Office 2019 could last us many years.
Personally I'd be more than happy to switch to LibreOffice, but that would never fly.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
Microsoft has been pushing Office 365 HARD for some time now. At microsoft.com, you have to do some digging to find anything about Office 2019, and even what you do find is scant. I only keep Microsoft Office around just in case I need 100% compatibility with a MS doc I've received or need to edit and send out. I'll probably buy Office 2019 some time this year, but it will probably be the final time I pay for an office suite. I prefer to use LibreOffice. Not only is the price right and the features meet and exceed all my needs, the UI is more intuitive and obvious.
That model worked well for the antivirus companies, eh? All of them are splashing in wads of cash... not. Let's see how long until MS "rethinks" this strategy....
I'm still on 2007.
Now if they added some features......
...If you're not doing complicated macros and formulas, you have plenty of legal open source alternatives.
That's not entirely right - macros do exist, though in another language.
Open source alternatives suck big time - from the interface to speed to everything else one can imagine.
In short, not worth a try for the majority of [ordinary] users.
That explains why despite being "free" they have no traction to be proud of.
... that never happened and it never will.
You're welcome.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is this just a matter of paying for software as a subscription vs perpetual or is there actual functional differences with the software that runs on your computer? (minus cloud integration bits like onedrive etc).
I've been a user of office 365 through the organization I work with though as far as Office is concerned I use office 2010 (downloaded from office 365 itself portal years ago) running on windows 7 (in a VM which runs on linux). So it's not as if I am using an "office 365" desktop application. My office use is limited though, I do keep outlook open all the time for occasional email/calendar use(most of my email use is OWA from the browser on linux pointed at office 365).
My biggest complaints about SaaS has been the unilateral ways the vendors can force changes down upon you without the ability to opt out. I'm not a fan of subscription software(cost model specifically) but for me at least it's not nearly as bad as some auto updating/breaking app that changes constantly for no reason.
I assume this is just a cost model thing.
Office is the main reason I detest Microsoft.
In Australia, office 365 without exchange server costs $144/yr.
We get 10 years from an office licence, because let’s face it, nothing has really changed in a long time. So that’s $1400 vs $280 to buy an outright retail licence, so 500% more expensive.
We don’t use their file storage, because we don’t trust the cloud and it fragments our data backup strategy.
I would dearly love to move our 50 users to Libre, but Libre doesn’t have outlook, and still screws up document formatting.
No wonder it’s called the Microsoft Tax.
46137
They are smart!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'll never forget the commercials where Microsoft ridiculed their own customers for using their products.
I never went into MS Office willingly to begin with. The Corel office suite was better way back when, and now Libre Office is easier to use and has a better price point.
Screw MS Office.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Office 365 had 10x the support costs for in house IT persons vs Office 2017 desktop.
365 meant MS shuffled the UI, feature set, defaults every few months which caused many business users to call IT support.
Business users wanted to use Excel, Word and PowerPoint and not have to relearn every few months because the MS UX team decided to change the UI just to change it.
Don't get me started on the Electron, JavaScript hack known as MS Teams....
We can't actually buy software "for business use only" since even when purchased standalone Office requires a Microsoft account to activate.
So have your employees twiddling their thumbs while MS tries to fix their broken infrastructure? That will go well...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...to market to you whether you want it or not. They need to increase their take rate (in their own greedy little minds) and they're willing to strong-arm you into it if necessary. Right now we're at "must present your personal data" in order to get the "good" price but they're (all of the tech companies) not giving you just compensation for your data. How long before we hit "must allow our advertising efforts to reach you in order to get the good price"?
I monitor an email server that is constantly receiving messages from Office 365 users that they didn't knowingly send, but were sent using their compromised accounts. Why would I consider authorizing access to such a "service" within my organization?
Long known truth: Most software features are never ever ever used.
MS knows it, Adobe knows it, Oracle knows it yet they throw new features out, rebrand the UI, create a new UI layout every 2 years, etc... just as a way to say it's new and shiny so buy the new version.
"Why 45% of all software features in production are NEVER Used."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-45-all-software-features-production-never-used-david-rice
Steve Jobs did a disservice to us when he chromed up the UI and let UX design icebergs of wasted nuances. That's billions of wasted dollars producing disposable features and shiny UI..
Consider the extra $500.00 you'll spend for screen animations, the flashing stylized boot up logo, etc in your next car. Not to mention phone integration, apple car play, remote start, remote control via a smartphone app, voice commands for radio, phone, etc, .....
That's $500.00 you could have spent paying of your student loans.
It's known as the 'technology creep tax'.
Fuck this software as a service model!
I will not put my private business all over the internet or on a third party server. There are no privacy laws protecting us from disclosure and even if there were, laws do not prevent crime. If I am running a startup creating a quantum computing based office productivity suite, should I really be stupid enough to think that M$ won't read my documents either directly or through software? Come on... imagine if Colonel Sanders put his secret recipe on MS's servers. Even with laws, you would still have to "prove" that they saw your information.
If M$ wants to get more money from us, make better, more reliable software that sells itself. If a new version does something better, then I will WANT to buy it. For my small businesses, I'm using LibreOffice and it works well. It's not perfect by any means, but it is sufficient, especially since every subsequent version improves things like reliability.
The entire POINT of personal computers was to get out from under the control of centralized timeshare services that were popular in the 1970s.
Why the hell would anyone want to go back to that badness?
I want a word processor/spreadsheet/database that is under MY control on MY computer.
Creimer doesn't have time for your buggery. He's getting his Windows 10 certification in two months!
.. So take their advice (or shitposts) with a grain of salt. Microsoft is a company and their goal is to make money, and they make a lot of money by having customers pay them for office.
What's really at the core here is that there are really now two versions of office, and Microsoft is looking to get rid of one of them for various reasons. More complicated, It's not even about the major office version. It's about software licensing and distribution models.
First we have 'old' office - It's got a lot of names but when you're licensing and administering office it's often called the 'msi' version. This uses the classic MSI based office installer. Deployments are customized with the office customization tool and are distributed locally from file shares or media. It can use MAK and KMS activation. Updates are deployed via windows update or msi packages.
It's the way Microsoft has been had been and distributing business software for just about 20 years This type of office has not been sold retail for some time and is only available via volume licence agreement. It integrates well with SCCM and is very classic Microsoft enterprise-y stuff.
Now we also have 'new' office. - It usually called the 'click to run' version of office and this is what you get with office 365. For admins It's installed via the office deployment tool that uses an .xml config file. (There is also a easy self service installer for end users that has no config options) By default it downloads everything off microsoft's cloud server a install time but you can cache installs locally. Updates come via CTR office's internal update engine- Completely independent of windows update.
This style of office is very service oriented. You can even pick slow or fast or bleeding edge development channels to choose if you want stable old versions or newer features.There are also a few licensing modes that are configurable at install time but they all require an office 365 account (They just change how the licensing tokens are handled on individual machines)
Everyone here should be able to guess which version Microsoft wants to retire. They've made it abundantly clear that they're moving everything to services, and this includes office. Office '2019' is the same office suite weather you buy it volume license or o365. With 365 you get more or less what is current because it's a subscription model.
At some point they're going to ditch the old msi installers all together. The writing is also on the wall for the old windows update, which is the primary update method for msi office. The only reason VL office 2019 is still around is for very large organizations that are used to doing their software distribution that way. Microsoft is pretty much telling these guys that they can expect to move to services too.
I used excel 2010 last week because I had a network issue that prevented me from logging into work - and it was AMAZING compared to the piece of crap 365 version. It was just amazing. Everyone at my office are frogs in a pot of increasingly unstable, unusable Office 365 fluid
I want to see them taxed at 90% like they should.
FUCK THEM BOTH.
RICH CUNTS!!
Is that in between his janitor job and manning glory holes all over San Jose?
The entire software industry is moving this direction.
Libre/Free software industry isn't doing that. Still don't understand why people buy into the SaaS model of closed source for exorbitant fees.
When MBAs take a company over from engineers.
Why, you may ask?
Well, when I was teaching in the University in 2009, I was Happy with OpenOffice for Mac for my needs. I even had to live through the Great Fork (eventually, went LibreOffice in 2013). Did the class materials in Impress, exams in Writer, used Calc for the calification Sheets (had to use Yed for network diagrams because there was no equivalent to Visio)...
But then, I started to do Technical training for Huawei and Nokia... And guess what?
The class materials were done in PowerPoint, and if you opened them with Impress the formating would go to hell, even if the presentations were done in Office 2003 or 2007! And no one paid me to fix the formating of every!single!slide! *
The report forms were done in Excel, good luck getting the formating and the (very simple) macros to work in Calc. And good luck getting the guys in china/finland to be able to get it back completely right and trasparently in their copy of excel.
The daily assistance templates and example exams were done in word, good luck getting the formating right in writer upon opening, without wasting (unpaid) time wrestling with the formating.
And if you wanted to send some extra material to the trainees that you wanted them to be able to edit, guess what would happen if they tried to open your libreoffice docs in their company supplied copy of office? It was a coin toss if the document would display correctly or not.
So. I went office. But not standalone office for mac. I went office 365 for mac, and also got 1TB of onedrive that I do not use, and a lot of minutes for Skype calling to international phones that comes in handy from time to time, all for a very reasonable bundle price...
Oh, and on top of that, the SW is always on the latest version, pretty good when you get to an audience of very saavy telco trainees, instead of sporting your old copy of office 2007. If there is a problem with formating, the trainees can lay the blame were it belongs: in the guys who did the presentations, not on an old as hell unsupported copy of the SW (or on some very good but not compatible FOSS software).
I still have LibreOffice on my SSD, but I am thinking very seriously to remove it to save space (256GB SSD, with a 100GB Bootcamp/WinVM, had to move my steam library to an SD card**). I'll say that office is slightly better interface wise than LOffice, and MUCH better dictionary wise (specially in spanish). I realy found Open/LibreOffice good enough, but in the end, the circumstances decided against it.
JM2C YMMV
* Actually, that's the reason I declined the work of translating slides from chinglish to Spanish, the translating would break the formating, and you ended up wasting more time redoing the formating, than you got paid for the translaiton (you got paid per word, and very low at that, quite frustrating).
** When I get my next mac, I'll try to move steam to an iSCSI target drive. Moving it to a SMB 3.1 share on my NAS did not work out very well
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Considering I still use my retail 2010 license I can understand why they would prefer to sell the subscription service.
But it's also the same reason I will continue to use 2010.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Well, I don't understand why you need a GUI to write a letter. I'm using troff and layout-wise everything that needs special handling has an associated macro and comes out consistently right with no fuss.
Realistically, the simple answer to redmond's finest popularity is that "everyone" uses redmond's finest because "everyone" is using redmond's finest. And they haven't even the minimal knowledge or skill to even dare try anything else, ever. They've been skillfully kept uninformed and unwilling to become informed by redmond's marketeering.
Now redmond thinks it can make more money pushing people to their SaaS offering and so they'll do exactly that. Whether it is good for anyone else doesn't come into it. Not for them, and not for the uninformed clientele. They'll get this fed to them by redmond's marketeering and they'll bloody well like it, redmond's marketeering will make sure of that.
So the short version is that redmond's customers are puppets, who'll dance as told.
Of course I hardly ever need a word processor anyway.
Really, the main reason I "need" an office suite at all is because some people still insist on using Word for everything - whether it's a simple note that would've been just fine as a plaintext email, or a list of updates they want made on some website page (which is doubly fun if the changes they've provided are for a page on a Wordpress site).
#DeleteChrome
Software that you own can be:
-Transferred
-Sold
-Written off for taxes
Microsoft gets no compensation for this.
Software that is rented generates a more predictable revenue stream. Also, with analytics, they can mine valuable data, and use your bandwidth as they see fit.
Expect more software to use the "small monthly fee" model.
Many of the state agencies I know - software-as-service is an absolute non-starter.
They want to be able to cut a check, get the software, end of discussion.
Reoccurring monthly/yearly charges (with the exception of things like web hosting) are dead on arrival.
I agree. For the past seven years or so, I've been downloading LibreOffice.
The real reason, is with a credit card, the software is tied to a real identity.
MSFT Will know:
Your Real Name
Your Phone Number
Your real address
that is already Marketing gold.
Forget facebook and it's accounts. This is real stuff now.
Things can be personally tied to you.
To prove Office 2019 isn't worth buying -- you and your company should go with LibreOffice/LaTeX instead
FTFY, and done.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If they are pushing a purely online experience with Office 365, I would rather go the route of G-suite for business.
Since I have used both, I can attest to the collaborative benefits , features and reliability of G-suite (enterprise) over office 356 online tools.
Office 365 with the thick client suite had the benefit of fidelity and performance (i.e. large Excel datasets), but this is rapidly improving for online based office suites.
*Note: G-suite allows for offline use in most of their core products....but ask yourself, just how productive is your office when the network goes down or your WiFi stops working ? Fact is our business processes, workflows and tools are online dependent.
I already see the writing on the wall with Microsoft. Practically everything coming from Microsoft will be a subscriber based service or software and that will probably include Windows at some point.
Damn, stack ranking is getting cutthroat!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I won't buy Office 2019.
Huh?
No, nobody said anything about getting 365, why?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As you surmise, buying and renting are the same thing in the long-term. If you pay $200 for Office and upgrade to a new version every 5 years, you're paying the same as renting it for $40/yr. So in terms of cost, there's really no difference between buying and renting. If you buy a car for $30k, use it for 5 years, and sell it for $15k, you've paid the same as leasing it for $250/mo. Whether the subscription price is better or worse just depends on the price points and how often you normally upgrade. Office 365 is a bit overpriced IMHO (since most people only need Word and Excel). But Adobe Creative Cloud for Photography (Lightroom + Photoshop) is pretty close to what I was paying to keep Lightroom and Photoshop updated (Adobe actually adds useful new features which make upgrading compelling, like a better healing brush, better noise reduction, filter to fix focus or camera shake).
The real difference is on Microsoft's end. If they sell copies of software, they have to keep separate teams to maintain Office 2019, Office 2016, Office 2013, Office 2010 - for however many years until they EOL it and discontinue support. OTOH if they offer only a subscription, they can just drop the teams supporting Office 2010, 2013, and 2016, and force everyone to upgrade to the 2019 version. I ran across the downside of this recently. A client's custom software which ran fine on Windows 7 and early versions of Windows 10, would no longer work on current versions of Windows 10. There's no way to revert back to an earlier build of Windows 10 (Microsoft drops support after about 9 months and forces you to upgrade). So the client had to pay to have their custom software modified so it'd work on the current version of Windows 10.
My company was recently told to participate in a "voluntary" SAM assessment where we had to prove that we had the correct type and number of licenses to run Microsoft software. Best guess is that this "opportunity" was due to our Office365 subscription, since how else would MS know we even use their software.
So go for the subscription if you don't mind opening yourself up to an advert/audit.
Still don't understand why people buy into the SaaS model of closed source for exorbitant fees.
Maybe because those of us who use these things know, especially the oft trotted out Adobe stuff, that it's actually cheaper. I use PhotoShop for photo editing, and simply can't get used to GIMPS interface, especially years ago before they had the dockable windows. I've used PhotoShop since 7.0 came out.
I used to upgrade ~2 versions of PhotoShop, because there are things being integrated into the newer versions that make my job easier. With CC over the same amount of time I save $100+. I also get LightRoom for "free". You know, LightRoom, the program made specifically for photos, AND I also get PhotoShop for the super heavy edits. For cheaper.
As a trade off I have to ensure my PC is connected to the internet every couple months. Boo hoo, I'm sure the PC will never ever be connected to the internet /s
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
You can't use O365 for legally restricted documents, ie HIPPA, FERPA, ITAR, many court documents, company secrets, etc. In particular, ITAR (military research) documents must not leave the country, and you have no idea where MS is replicating it. You probably also shouldn't use it for stuff you just don't want to risk leaking to the internet.
I use Office maybe twice a year, if they don't have a Pay-As-You-Go subscription, then I wont ever get their subscription.
Besides, my Office 2010 still does everything I need.
Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019
Done, I won't. I'm still never going to sign up for any software as a service. Currently running office 2013 on Windows 7. I'm not sure what I'll do when Win7 support is dropped though. But buying into subscription software won't be it.
Thank you for this very specific (== very subjective) rare case point to disprove a multitude of common sense arguments against SaaS. /s
* You can control patches
* You can install from a network share without bullshit xml files and hours of testing
* You can have an SOE image
Until they actually give a fuck about IT administrators, Microsoft will continue to suck balls.
Less focus on retarded users, more focus on administration.
Office 365 on Android tablets, iPads or in a browser.
The market has spoken; consumers don't want to abandon their primary OS just to run an office suite. And MS learned the hard way by betting the farm on Windows Phone and their stillborn UWP-based Windows Store for desktop.
Microsoft are now emphasising the cloud and transitioning their customers away from Windows via their WSL offering whilst abandoning their own web browser tech for a half-arsed Chrome clone. Windows is now a platform for legacy software and high end gamers who demand better performance than an XBox can provide.
I though everyone have moved from that to Gmail or the other Office suites; I have been using Libre Office for a while and I didn't notice any difference, I only use word processor and spreadsheets, but that's all most people need.
- Accountants and financial people use Excel extensively
- Sales, consulting, managers use Word and PowerPoint extensively
Other MS Office products are used by a tiny fraction of the entire user population.
I'd ask MS for a business case that Office 365 with the monthly SaaS tax is cost effective versus installing the latest desktop Office on each new computer purchased given a 3+ year expected lifespan of said computer.
Eventually, MS will stop supporting the desktop versions and force everyone to go to a subscription model.
The crux is that software vendors want to supply only javascript/html via the cloud to a browser or a *yuck* win32 exe running a browser control (electron).
I expect SaaS solutions to grow to ballpark figures by 2025:
- 250,000 lines of JavaScript in the client with 100,000 lines from 50 different Nuget packages where 1/2 of them are broken or obsolete
- 100,000 lines of html/css
- win32 exe with a browser control and electron
- server side of node + 500,000 lines of JavaScript
- poorly written unsupported open source interconnect to a document database data store of some sort
- etl job to replicate data to a relational reporting database (doc database doesn't do 1,000,000 line reports well)
- relational database for reporting
- plus many interconnects to third party web services, web api, rest interfaces, plus whatever replaces web api
just a tiny on the unmaintainable side and many of the thousands of components in the solution at end of life / past end of life
with 2 or 3 four month fire drills to replace failing components every year
This is bullshit. Older versions of MS Office activate offline perfectly fine thanks. The official MSDN version of the ISO file for Office Pro 2003 is publicly available online with trusted checksums and when burned to disc or simply unpacked to a USB stick using 7zip it installs and runs fine without any network connectivity. You're welcome.
The Adobe argument has been rehashed for years. It is cheaper IF you were one of the few people or organizations that purchased every update.
Their rental program offers each program for about $10-$20 per month, purchased in year increments. $10 per month for Photoshop & Lightroom means $120/year. If you get the suite, it is $600 per year. With the old costs back in CS5 and CS6 days, if you purchased the near-yearly updates then it was cheaper. Few people and businesses bought upgrades that often.
Most individuals would wait for years between updates (assuming they paid for it at all, which is probably the real reason for the change). As a personal example, I went from CS3 released in 2007 to CS6 from 2012. For about $200 I used great software for five years, or about $3.33 per month versus $50 per month. True I didn't get the cutting-edge bugs, but I didn't have a need for them.
I still use CS6 from 2012 for everything except Lightroom, which I now must rent to keep up with camera file formats. That saves me about $500 each year.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
get the terminology right, ffs.
365 is a rental. some editions of windows are rentals, and when microsoft gets their way, even consumer windows will be a fucking rental.
rentals tie licenses to people, prevent the 3rd party resale, and allows microsoft to track literally everything you do in or with the software. when perpetual licenses are no longer available, they will prevent piracy as well... money money money is all they care about, without any regard to user preference or convenience.
I DON'T WANT A FUCKING MICROSOFT ACCOUNT. so i haven't purchased an office since 2010 edition. when that runs out (i.e. is forced into obsolescence), since you can't even buy a perpetual license for office anymore without an online account, i will be switching to free software (and, in fact, have already begun the migration on a new pc build). when windows 7 and 8 get retired, the operating systems themselves will be switched to linux (i have one now i've been working on configurations and seeing what i can live without and what i still need that i could run via wine). microsoft is done here. there's literally nothing they could do to get me to change my mind.
https://softlay.net/microsoft-office/ms-office-2003-download.html
Worked for me.
More bullshit. Screw them. Use OpenOffice or Libre Office or anything other than their bullshit.
Works great, can run LibreOffice on any platform.
Office programs haven't added or needed amy notable functionality that we actually need or use since the 90s.
It's only that businesses *have* to keep adding shit to justify having a business.
LibreOffice is more than enough.
If you need more, use specialized software. Like Scribus, LaTeX, etc. imstead of Word. Or a scripting language instead of Excel. Or not working in a cancerous company of suits instead of Powerpoint.
I bought office 2019. First it told me that I had to sign up for their "office 365" account to get the key. That was really annoying. Then, it told me that I could not install it on Windows 7 and had to upgrade. That was the deal breaker.
If OpenOffice and LibreOffice could do better there and with a little more functionality, they'd blow Microsoft out of the water.
Get a boob job?
The use case of a business crucially depending on one specific piece of paid-for software is far more common than you think.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Then they should just cancel your license and return the money so you can get something better
Have you pay monthly fee forever or pay once. Duh everyone wants someone to pay forever! What Microsoft does not want you to know is that Office 2007 and 2010 are still in VERY active and in service and there is NO need to upgrade. Why buy Office 2013, 2016 or 2019 when what you have works. Why subscribe and pay forever when the older versions work just fine? Oh yeah they want more money. Duh!
Prepare for office365 to become "free" and force upgraded soon. All your data is worth more than subscription. Just need more buyers!
What about all the situation where a permanent connection to the Internet is not advisable/possible?
For example on board of ships..
What Microsoft advice for those situation?
When you go with the subscription, you need to allow your PC to connect to the net so it can periodically phone home to the Microsloth mothership. You have no guarantee, however, that it's not also giving them access to your personal and/or business information. Same problem with the constant phoning home by Win10. They say they are just trying to improve your user experience, but that's not enough to justify vacuuming-up keystrokes, mouse movements, and more.
Let's face it, nobody is monitoring the payloads of all those data packets flowing to MS from their PC and decoding those packets to discover just what access Microsoft is getting to their personal data. People simply prefer not to think about it and they pretend they are being safe while having no actual evidence for it. If your PC is in regular contact with another system which you do not control, and it is sending data packets to that system without your specific permission and your personal inspection of the data in question, then you have ZERO computer security. I'm looking at YOU, Windows10 users. Add an office365 subscription if you truly want to prove yourself a vacuous fool.
...water is wet.
Probable best to encourage people to move to Open Standards, which is something the British Government is doing right: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov...
Microsoft objected, when the British Government first mentioned they might: https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
I'm amazed anyone would even consider Windows + Office for ITAR. Or rather, I'd wish I was. It's hard to find a worse combination of tools for work meant to be secured, but in the end, people are people. Asking for a moment of brain activity is as per usual, too much, no matter what's at stake.
The online version of Excell, Word and outlook really suck compaired to the offline version. very slow, a lot of visual updating problems (or mostly just missing a lot of options).
Now I am a user of LibreOffice and Linux but up until around 2004 I was quite happy using Microsoft Word 2.0, released in 1991. had it continued to work on newer Windows versions I would no doubt still be using it. Although, as it did not work it gave me the opportunity to find out what else was out there. That's when I discovered the world of Open Source and abandoned Windows entirely with Windows XP being the last version I used in production. My computing has been a lot less stress free since.
Missing option: Libre Office
It fails to authorise on startup most days and claims it is unlicensed, it does not work at all unless your connected to the internet, it is buggy, unreliable and has a kludge UI when it is working, it Libre Office for heavy duty word processing or Google docs is suitable for most consumer level word processing.
Word 365 is great, until you try to do something it doesn't provide. My wife and I have used both. She likes Word 365 because it works on her Chromebook. But there are tasks (e.g. including a graph from Excel 365) which are simply impossible to accomplish. Then we have to fire up Word on her old MacBook.
I recently had to set up a spreadsheet app on a family member's tablet.
I thought the obvious solution was some free open source office suit akin to Open/Libre Office. I personally haven't used MS Office for well over a decade. But Microsoft's Mobile/cloud based solution is literally a no funny business, no nonsense direct port of the Application you used in High school (or college, or your job). It does not try to reinvent the wheel for mobile, it does not strip out 99% of the functionality to make it simpler, it just works exactly as you remember that it should on desktop or mobile.
I have yet to see a port of a desktop app that was half as good as excel for Office 365. Then when I had to troubleshoot a problem with spreadsheet code, I was able to just hope onto the browser based solution from my desktop, and it just worked exactly how you would want it to.
I could see it being a very good solution for a business who wanted people on desktops and mobile devices modifying and reading the same document. But I imagine they work together well as it is not only the same UI, but the same file format from what I have seen.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"... no way ... I am going to pay you for a subscription."
Answer: LibreOffice is free.
Google Documents might not be for everyone, but it has been fine for our company of ~30. Great for collaboration, sharing settings easy to tweak for integration with other software (Trello is my go-to).
I prefer Google Sheets over Excel, mainly because with the companies we work with, uploading data to cross-reference in Excel is going to be met with an immediate scientific notation explosion. Just leave my data alone until I format it!
If Microsoft is going to push you to go online-only, why not use Google Documents if you are able to instead? I think MS should be careful about this. Office 365 is inferior to the desktop versions. The "features" that people need (keeping them from using GD or Libre/OO) are often missing from the 365 version anyway. If you force people away from the desktop versions, they may just hire a proper program to build them applications instead of trying to run a company out of an excel sheet with macros.
Microsoft can "want" stuff, like converting their Office customers to Office 365. They can want it all day. Customers are going to make their own decisions based upon customer criteria.
Example data points:
- Microsoft wanted customers to adopt Windows Vista;
- Microsoft wanted customers to adopt Windows 8;
- Microsoft wanted customers to adopt Windows Mobile;
If the customers decide otherwise, then Microsoft will swallow their pride and take the customer money for local installs of Microsoft Office.
Maybe oh I don't know, NOT require a piece of shit evil Microsoft account to activate a fucking Office product? It's an office product. No really, it's an Office product. NOT worth giving up your identity, creating a Microsoft account only to have that account shutdown because they "dont like your name" which then locks the key that you just paid for.
Microsoft IS the new definition of Evil. Look at Windows 10. Spying on you, Advertising to you, Installing Software that you dont want, watching what you type, say.
Holy FUCK this is some scary shit.
So no, No office or other Microsoft (No google either) products for this 12,000 person company. I've mandated OSS.