this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 55 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Oh shit maybe we'll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Yeah. So it's

  1. thunderbird
  2. some add-on

right? I forget the name of that add-on.

No, that's not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that's it. But it's only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let's ask Co-pilot again:

THERE it is.

But I learned there's a second alternative, so that's cool. See? Co-pilot has value!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

Like using Edge to download Firefox, I approve

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Makes me glad I continue to use the free Google and MS Office options and keep my cloud storage with a service that is dedicated to just storage.

Cuts down on all of the forced price increases due to the AI mess the MBAs need to justify the expense of.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Damn, we really didn't see that coming now did we? Can't wait until Amazon pulls that trigger on AWS.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Fuck the MS suite is such garbage. My work was sold in for Teams with all the BS. Now I have to either map up the filepath creating what we used to have, or I can't see the file folder and make a call at the same time. Onenote with it's arbitrary syncing. And good luck finding it again since it stored at some random place if you loose access.

Word and excel is decent, but for a person who likes to tinker with versions it's a nightmare to invite people to edit it.

Cluncky interface, slow and bloated all around

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago

The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 5 days ago (2 children)

For existing customers, the price hike won't be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the "Classic" or "Basic" Microsoft 365 plans.

Thankfully we can roll back to the "Classic Family Plan" without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn't see this article I'd be up for a big price hike when it renewed.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Everyone experiencing this should be thinking "man, I gotta ditch Microsoft before they try to fuck me again"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

NO one using Microsoft is doing so by choice. If we haven't learned in 30 years, then fuck us.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Their office suite is still the winner.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

Absolutely. This has made me acutely aware that my days with MS are numbered.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Make it too expensive and people will switch to Google docs.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Google workspace just pulled the same crap with Gemini

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago

The point is it's free.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Excel is the deal breaker on that. My last company was all Google products and auth, but I still had to buy Excel for the accounting and HR teams.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Um excel certainly has its places, but accounting? Don't they have actual dedicated software for accounting? HR? Like payroll? Again don't they have actual software for that?

And I was thinking personal use, whose costs were posted. $100 a year, fuck that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's hard to believe, but I work at a Fortune 100 company that's still heavily reliant on Excel.

Sure, we have specific software as System of Record (Oracle suite, mainly). But for all the day to day estimating and calculating and reporting and other noodling, people routinely export to Excel and play with numbers from there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

The point is you can use google docs or Libreoffice for day to day mundane things.

It's only the huge power features that you need Excel for, maybe in engineering. For accounting when you get to that power feature point I'm surprised there isn't dedicated software.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it's not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.

From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it's clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn't really need Excel... but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I'd probably switch to something else.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

See you think that - but excel finds a way. We have what are lovingly called the "spreadsheets of doom" which accounting uses to manage all forecasts, and the bits that involve money flows. Did you know you can hook excel into Salesforce and pull all the sales records? A person who thinks her monitor is her computer (she has a Dell laptop) somehow found a way...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

I remember my dad had a problem and asked if he had to take the monitor or the tower to the shop.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago

Phew, this was a good reminder since I was meaning to cancel my subscription anyway. It was going to auto renew in 2 days. 😬

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