Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019 (venturebeat.com)

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Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019 (venturebeat.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday February 6, 2019 @07:20AM from the how-about-that dept.

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.

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Have it your way, MS by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-06 07:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

I will then not give you any money, for there is no way in hell I am going to pay you a recurrent subscription.
1. Re:Have it your way, MS by Jane+Q.+Public · 2019-02-06 17:33 · Score: 2
  
  I second that.
  
  Bad enough that ffice products have historically been grossly overpriced; now they're trying to force people into a subscription model that will likely end up costing them a lot more in the long run.
  
  I don't "subscribe" to software. Sell it to me or get lost.
2. Re: Have it your way, MS by arglebargle_xiv · 2019-02-06 19:11 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  Cynni and Tanny present their findings in PowerPoint
  That one has possibiliies though. In the opening scene, Cynni and Tanni start working on Powerpoint. Then they get bored and start working on each other. Just as Cynni is eating Tanni out, a pizza delivery guy turns up. A really well-hung pizza delivery guy, who proceeds to ream out Cynni while Tanny calls over her friend Crystal who sucks off the pizzza delivery guy. In the meantime, Tanny notices a plumber whos been fixing something under under the sink...
SaaS is news? by UnknownSoldier · 2019-02-06 07:23 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?
1. Re:SaaS is news? by jellomizer · 2019-02-06 07:34 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The side effect for the company. Other then just printing millions of CD's for you app and selling them for a hundreds of dollars. You now need to maintain a full data-center to handle the data for millions of customers.
  Cloud is good when you need to share across networks. Or you are a small organization who just doesn't have a secure infrastructure. But for others having software that you can buy and keep updated (or not) yourself is useful. There isn't too many features past office 97 that I really need. Why can't I use office 97 for work.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
2. Re:SaaS is news? by kurkosdr · 2019-02-06 08:28 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Don't need the latest MS Office features? No problem, Microsoft has a solution for that. Constant format changes (which you have to track if you want files that other MS Office users send you to open properly) will make sure you 'll have to buy the newest MS Office version. Or subscribe to Office 365 when "buy" is not an option anymore. Good luck convincing your boss or your professor how he should change Office suites or how he should not use the latest version of the Office suite (or that he should risk document mangling by using an older format version). The tactic is called "planned obsolescence by use of network effects" btw...
3. Re: SaaS is news? by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-06 08:34 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Office2003
  + Office2007FileFormatConverters.exe
  + Windows7
  == #LastKnownGood
4. Re: SaaS is news? by cyber-vandal · 2019-02-06 09:13 · Score: 2
  
  You poor bastard...
5. Re:SaaS is news? by Solandri · 2019-02-06 09:46 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The really stupid thing is that unless you're collaborating with someone on a document, you shouldn't be exchanging Word of Excel or Powerpoint documents. Those programs are for creating the document. Once it's created, you're supposed to print it out (to paper or a PDF) and distribute that to the people you want reading it. Emailing people the .doc file is like sending the source code to someone who only needs a copy of the executable, then telling them they need to buy a copy of the latest compiler to convert the source code into the file that they really need.
6. Re:SaaS is news? by Darinbob · 2019-02-06 11:02 · Score: 2
  
  Excel often fails because you won't know which numbers can be changed without seeing if there's a formula behind them, and you can't tell what the spreadsheet really does until you understand all the formulas. And trying to figure out the formulas is painful if you're not the author.
7. Re: SaaS is news? by c-A-d · 2019-02-06 13:47 · Score: 2
  
  This is where a wine port to windows could come in handy.
  
  --
  some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
8. Re: SaaS is news? by badboy_tw2002 · 2019-02-06 13:54 · Score: 2
  
  It's whatever version it was around the age you turned ~38. Everything after that is terrible - the worst piece of shit those know nothing idiots could come up with. Everything before it was built rock solid, to last, by the last great generation of people who actually knew what they were doing.
  See also: cars, computer HW, entertainment etc etc etc.
9. Re:SaaS is news? by DaTrueDave · 2019-02-06 13:56 · Score: 2
  
  Excel often fails because you won't know which numbers can be changed without seeing if there's a formula behind them, and you can't tell what the spreadsheet really does until you understand all the formulas. And trying to figure out the formulas is painful if you're not the author.
  You find it difficult to select a cell and look in the formula bar to see if there's a formula? I'm an Excel dummy, and even I know that your first notion is absurd.
10. Re: SaaS is news? by rtb61 · 2019-02-06 17:11 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Why not take the freedom challenge. Download https://www.libreoffice.org/ and install and try it, no matter how much you like it, you will not have to pay for it, yours forever as is access to your documents. Take the freedom challenge or pay rent to M$ for the rest of your life, 10 years, 20 years 50 years, 100 years or more paying rent to read the letters you wrote but no longer own the access to, you can only rent it, one month at a time and they can take it away at any time for any reason, perhaps because you are not paying enough, so how high will that rent go, you can guarantee it will go up, just as you can guarantee upgrades will slow to a crawl.
  
  --
  Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
they are half right........ by wolfie_cr · 2019-02-06 07:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

actually neither are worth buying for probably higher than 90% of people.........libreoffice all the way
1. Re:they are half right........ by jellomizer · 2019-02-06 07:38 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Quite true.
  Now if we can get Schools and Universities to use it and recommend it to students. Vs. Having the Professors with Cool Microsoft Swag to make sure the students pay for legit MS Office copies.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
2. Re:they are half right........ by Dan+East · 2019-02-06 07:42 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
  
  --
  Better known as 318230.
3. Re:they are half right........ by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-06 07:46 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Well.....if enough people used LibreOffice, then they wouldn't NEED compatibility with MS Office.
  LibreOffice, for great justice!
4. Re:they are half right........ by Thelasko · 2019-02-06 08:17 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  LibreOffice is perfect for occasional home use, or a student writing a term paper. In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.
  
  The subscription model may be more profitable for Microsoft overall, but I have a hunch it will lose market share for cases that use the software casually. The same users that we hurt when Microsoft abandoned Works in 2009. Microsoft has opened up a nice niche for LibreOffice. Even though it's not as good as MS Office, it's much better than Works ever was.
  
  --
  One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
5. Re:they are half right........ by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-06 08:18 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
  I hate that it doesn't actually work.
  For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
  I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
  That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
  When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
6. Re:they are half right........ by damn_registrars · 2019-02-06 09:09 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Compatibility is the only reason MS still exists.
  To be honest, MS is often poorly compatible with MS. Compatibility is not the reason they exist.
  
  The reason MS - and MS Office in particular - exists is because it gives businesses an out if something goes awry. If I'm at business ABC and I get an important Office document from a customer from business DEF, I need to be able to show that I'm doing everything reasonable to open it. If it came in Office format and I have the latest version of MS Office, I can check that box even if the document eats shit and is completely unreadable. However if they send it to me and I have libreoffice (or any other non-MS Office suite) and can't open it, that is my fault. And there is money on the line, so I had best make sure I do everything I can to prevent cross-incompatibility.
  
  --
  Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
7. Re:they are half right........ by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-06 09:35 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Submit in PDF?
8. Re:they are half right........ by Solandri · 2019-02-06 09:50 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Microsoft already has that covered. Students and teachers can use Office 365 for free. It's like a drug - the first hit is free, and gets you addicted to an expensive lifetime habit.
  
  At least with their old program (where a student could buy a standalone copy of Office for $5), you could continue to use it even after graduating.
9. Re:they are half right........ by UnderCoverPenguin · 2019-02-06 10:08 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.
  
  At least where I work, nearly all the technical people are using LibreOffice - many of us are using it on Linux, though we all have "office PCs" for access to corporate email and several "business apps" we are forced to use.
  Anyway, the MS Office users in the company don't seem to notice. And any compatibility issues they do encounter are no worse than what they encounter in documents from customers and suppliers, who use different versions of MS Office, some as old as 2007. MS Office inter-version is often poor. We usually hear more complaints about outside documents than ones from the tech staff.
  
  --
  Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
10. Re:they are half right........ by Tough+Love · 2019-02-06 10:28 · Score: 2
  
  LibreOffice is perfect for occasional home use, or a student writing a term paper. In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.
  If Microsoft Office is a requirement at your place of work then you are working at the wrong place.
  
  --
  When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
11. Re: they are half right........ by Billly+Gates · 2019-02-06 13:09 · Score: 2
  
  That's cute.
  I get calls from executives all the time about free/busy meetings across shared Exchange calanders and getting Skype for business meetings working with external clients with Ms federations from customer active directories.
  You don't know what business use is until you support it. Until Libreoffice has freebusy and calanders and groups across the Enterprise than it's not worthy.
  Oh if you give me shit about telling the executives to fuck off and embrace freedom and evolution and send mail and educate them ... Then say hello to unemployment!
  In their eyes I am a plumber as IT is subservient to the real to the real rock stars like sales and fellow VP and CEO God's. That's life in a corporate IT department.
  MS Office ain't going nowhere
  
  --
  http://saveie6.com/
12. Re:they are half right........ by Nivag064 · 2019-02-06 21:50 · Score: 2
  
  I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
  I hate that it doesn't actually work.
  For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
  I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
  That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
  When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
  What was the last version of LibreOffice you tried? LibreOffice 6.2.0 is at RC3 level, and LibreOffice 6.1.4 is the latest stable version. If you are adventuresome, you can even download LibreOffice 6.3.0.0 Alpha and compile it yourself (trying asking Microsoft if you could download and compile their source code -- good luck, even if you are prepared to sign a contract!)! Though, not something I'd recommend for most people!
  If you have a problem with LibreOffice you can raise a bug report, and/or pay for commercial support. You can search the LibreOffice bug tracker to see if other people have hit the same problem -- can you do that for Microsoft Office???
  You don't mention the multiple problems people have with Microsoft Office, including file corruption. Is that deliberate?
  One place I worked, they had standardized on Microsoft Office, but I found LibreOffice easier to use, and no one complained about the files I sent them (I used the .doc type files).
  LibreOffice is more 'Microsoft compatible' than Microsoft Office, it will read all Microsoft word formats, even old ones that Microsoft Office can't without downloading extra stuff. Note that files produced by one version of Microsoft Office may not be fully compatible with another version.
  Also, LibreOffice supports over a 100 languages without having to pay extra.
  For most people, both LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, have far more features than they'd ever need.
  Oh, and you don't need a Microsoft Box to run it on, it will happily work on Linux as well, or on a Mac if you walk that way.
13. Re:they are half right........ by thegarbz · 2019-02-07 01:55 · Score: 2
  
  I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours
  And it sounds like what you learnt is to blindly trust someone else with your hard work. Maybe you should look to your own practices if you lost anything more than 10 minutes worth.
Well duh. by Smidge204 · 2019-02-06 07:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

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=
1. Re:Well duh. by ZorinLynx · 2019-02-06 07:48 · Score: 2
  
  >If a customer BUYS your software, then you get paid once but you still have to support it for years.
  That's not really the case, though. Eventually people upgrade computers, operating systems, and so on. Eventually they'll have to buy the latest version to continue using it with the latest hardware.
2. Re:Well duh. by DarkRookie2 · 2019-02-06 07:49 · Score: 2
  
  Yeah, but their service goes down more often than my PC does, and if you miss one payment you are going to lose access to them and anything else on the cloud.
  
  --
  http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
3. Re:Well duh. by Smidge204 · 2019-02-06 08:12 · Score: 2
  
  > Eventually they'll have to buy the latest version to continue using it with the latest hardware.
  My dad still uses Lotus 123.
  Old software runs on new OS/Hardware amazingly well. The only way to stop this is to intentionally break things to prevent it, which is probably a large part of why Microsoft was so ham-fisted getting people onto Windows 10... you can't avoid buying new software if the software you already own and paid for doesn't work anymore.
  =Smidge=
4. Re:Well duh. by Jaime2 · 2019-02-06 08:26 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Here's where the real confusion sets in. Office 365 is both a unique set of products/services and a unique way of paying. I use Office 365 - and I have the normal versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my computer. I don't save anything to Microsoft's cloud, and I don't use the cloud version of the apps. After factoring in the online meeting functionality and the excellent hosted email services that I would have to buy from someone anyways, it probably only costs me $50 a year. For that, I get to install Office on every PC and laptop in my house (limit 5).
  So, for many people Office 365 is simply a subscription plan for good-old-Office. For others, it's a cloud service. For others, it's a combination of both. But, if I miss one payment, all I lose is the ability to edit files. And I can always choose to switch to LibreOffice as long as I'm using the subset of functionality it supports.
Google docs by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-06 07:30 · Score: 2

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.
1. Re:Google docs by arth1 · 2019-02-06 08:05 · Score: 2
  
  Or Scrivener for those of us who write books and don't care about presentation and "pages", but care a lot more about typing than clicking.
  Libreoffice is even worse - I don't like having to wait a minute for reformatting because I changed WA to Washington on "page" 3 and now need to jump back to "page" 700.
more like rent by Locutus · 2019-02-06 07:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

"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
Re:What is even the appeal of "the cloud"? by DarkRookie2 · 2019-02-06 07:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

No one should want it, but Microsoft's marketing budget is at least 10 times their programming budget at this point.

--
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
No so fast, dude... by bogaboga · 2019-02-06 07:41 · Score: 3, Informative

...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.
1. Re:No so fast, dude... by Thelasko · 2019-02-06 08:01 · Score: 2
  
  >
  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.
  Not in my experience. I've been swapping files back and forth between Office and LibreOffice for years now. In my experience LibreOffice is much faster than Office365 because it doesn't need to be in constant contact with Microsoft servers.
  
  My mother-in-law was complaining about the Office365 subscription, so I installed LibreOffice. I've heard no complaints since.
  
  --
  One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Re:Alternatives by DarkRookie2 · 2019-02-06 07:41 · Score: 2

BOO!
Couldn't you link to the products directly.

--
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Microsoft Tax by labnet · 2019-02-06 07:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

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
So they will own your office documents by aglider · 2019-02-06 07:46 · Score: 2

They are smart!

--
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
You mean the thing that is down frequently? by gweihir · 2019-02-06 07:49 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:What is even the appeal of "the cloud"? by nwaack · 2019-02-06 07:53 · Score: 2

I guess people who don't backup their stuff might find it useful. Personally, I trust my el-cheapo Synology NAS a whole heck of a lot more than any cloud.
Re:Alternatives by Chris+Mattern · 2019-02-06 07:58 · Score: 2

Try this:
LibreOffice
Apache OpenOffice
Softmaker FreeOffice
WPS Office
(they have a whole office suite, not just the word processor)
Abiword
SoftMaker Office
(again, they have a whole suite, not just the word processor)
Pages (for Mac)
(Apple does other office apps, too, but they don't seem to
market a unified suite)
Atlantis Word Processor
45% of software features are used by Anonymous Coward · 2019-02-06 08:01 · Score: 3, Insightful

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'.
1. Re:45% of software features are used by Hadlock · 2019-02-06 08:56 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  With the sole exception of a business case report i had to write for a software package acquisition in...2014? I can't think of the last time I needed a formal word processor. Even then it wasn't strictly necessary.
  
  Most of my documents now (2017-2019) are written in markdown, which although there are a couple of competing standards, most parsers can accurately render 99%+ of documents legibly. It's no PDF but is a pretty portable standard.
  
  I still use excel-type spreadsheet software to calculate personal finance projects but the sum, average functions are pretty bog standard
  
  After that you have what, powerpoint? Depending on company culture you might do 80% of your real work in an app like this...
  
  Finally there's the mystery meat fourth app, which might be somethinng like MS Access, or MS Project or... MS Notes? Visio? Who the hell knows, whatever it is, you're probably better off using something else instead.
  
  I feel like the word processor is a dead segment, most "documents" I get these days are just well formatted emails, most spreadsheets are generic and interchangable, but powerpoint slideshow apps might be the one vendor lock-in left for office?
  
  --
  moox. for a new generation.
I was happy with LibreOffice but went with MS by williamyf · 2019-02-06 08:39 · Score: 3, Informative

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!
Office 2010 by Holi · 2019-02-06 08:41 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
Re: by Frobnicator · 2019-02-06 12:20 · Score: 2

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.

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