This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we're done half baking it into all our apps and now we're almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all."
The logic of the utterly deranged...
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that's updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
More anti consumer garbage forced by a monopolistic juggernaut which the governments of the world refuse to do more than mildly scold. It's worse than chatgpt and pops up almost everywhere you click. Something about heads in asses
Meanwhile, smart people: I sure do love Libre Office.
Don't forget GPT4All or JanAI, for those rare instances that you want to converse with a dumbass.
If smart people love libreoffice, then I must be dumb. Working with it always seems weird and I never like it.
Fortunately, I can use LaTeX for work; it is far from without issues but while being arcane sometimes (especially when tables are involved), it never really upsets me and the result looks very good. I can say neither for libreoffice or MS office. But at least the former doesn't charge for the experience.
I hope typst gains more traction; it seems really intuitive compared to TeX and you don't necessarily need a macro package. And while it doesn't produce the quality of TeX-based systems yet, it is already good. Then again, Knuth's goal first and foremost goal was quality (and it shows); the system just had to be usable by him.
You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.
I need to try onlyoffice again. The last time I tried, was the original beta, and it was faulty (being a first release beta, and all)
Oh onlyoffice works great! It's spreadsheet function is far less buggy than excel and it's smooth and snappy.
Sweet! I've been using MS at work (required) and Libre at home (because screw MS). I'll give Only another go!
Clippy is back!
GOZER
The choice is made. The Traveller has come.
VENKMAN
We didn't choose anything?!! I didn't think of an image, did you?
SPENGLER
No.
WINSTON
My mind's a total void!
[They all look at Ray]
RAY
I couldn't help it! It just popped in
there!
VENKMAN
What? What just popped in there?
SPENGLER
I have a radical idea... The door swings both ways. We could reverse the particle flow through the gate...
RAY
How?
SPENGLER
... we'll resize a table in Word
VENKMAN
Excuse me, Egon. You said resizing a table was bad...
RAY
[with realisation]
... resize the table...
VENKMAN
You're going to endanger us. You're going to endanger our client; the nice lady who paid us in advance before she turned into a dog
SPENGLER
Not necessarily. There's definitely a very slim chance we'll survive..
WINSTON
...
RAY
...
VENKMAN
I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! Let's do it!
If they actually bundled a game pass subscription with it and made a proper Microsoft complete subscription they could have softened the bad press they're getting on this (and giving customers something they've wanted for a while)
That and the fact that they've nearly doubled the price of the subscription to add a limited credit based feature just looks pretty slimy
Why on earth would they bundle gamepass into Office365? Office365 is pretty much used for business and educational institutions. Everybody else is a rounding error.
The overlap between Office365 owners and Xbox gamers is extremely small.
You'd just end up pissing everybody off by combining them
"They've added how much to the price by adding this gamer nonsense?! I don't need that crap, I want office software!"
"They've added how much to the price by including fucking PowerPoint and Outlook?! I don't need that crap, I want to play games!"
And not to defend MS, but a 43% increase isn't nearly doubling. A 100% increase would be doubling.
It's called Microsoft 365 now
Office 365 was when it was just a business productivity suite
They renamed it when they pivoted it to a general subscription and started adding things like clipchamp.
I mentioned in another comment though that I agree it would be silly to mess with the professional skus, but the home & family ones would make perfect sense to offer as an option at the very least (just as they're offering 365 without copilot for the time being).
I'm also not saying get rid of the independent subscriptions for Xbox, that would also be silly.
Just that a merged one would make a lot of sense for the people out there paying for both (which I reckon is a good number in the family subscription category at least)
bundled a game pass subscription
Most of the money MS gets from Office365 is from business users, not home users. I have a feeling that trying to sell game pass to corporate clients isn't going to be a huge hit...
Sure and it would be silly to mess with the professional tiers
But personal and family subscriptions are fairly squarely positioned towards non-business users as their main demographics, from what I can see.
They should have made it opt-in instead of opt-out IMHO. You can still get the old subscription when you renew, but you have to jump through a couple of hoops. If you do nothing you just get "upgraded" for no reason.
Dolla dolla bill.
I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn't add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it's almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
It's not for you. It's for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
To please the shareholders. Then, when AI is no longer deemed valuable and its tremendous costs sink in, they will remove it and layoff the teams that worked on it, to please the shareholders.
That's way too simplistic, as often.
For the shareholders, having an investment of several billions turn into an unwanted add-on for a few dollars is not a good thing. It's the opposite, almost like a fire sale.
But they'll keep the prices high
The clippy we all deserved