Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too.
The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on.
Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible.
They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026 [0]. Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files. The solution for that? Run a powershell script to convert all your publisher files to (uneditable) PDF.
There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed or was included in M365, and used PowerPoint as an everything-is-a-hammer crutch, and have now gotten jobs at Microsoft and are sticking with it.
Also, as far as I can tell, Publisher is the only application where the color-picker includes Pantone colors which is a must for professional poster production. I assume Microsoft is paying a licensing fee for this, and I wonder if they'll remember to cancel it.
Perhaps Affinity can eat their lunch and release a word-processor.
They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year.
Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
> Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98.
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
People no longer really look at a product and ask if it does what they need, they just compare it to the previous product and ask if the newer product has 'more.' More is ALWAYS better, and there's no reason to think past this stage.
In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete.
Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.
I came to say something similar. Office 2000 seems more than sufficient for everybody outside of some very specific niches. The success of the comparatively much more basic Google Docs and Sheets are proof of this.
Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.
Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.
SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.
This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever. The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Business basic goes from $6 to $7. Business premium is unchanged from $22 to $22.
Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.
> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
The great unwashed masses will still continue to pay it. It's not a sizeable increases that they'd be willing to move elsewhere. People rationalize it in the context of it's only a buck a month and other things increase by more. M$ are not stupid but do know what they're doing. May take is. Don't do drugs. Don't do subscriptions. Don't do MICROS~1.
In my experience, most people, especially execs who are negotiating the licensing deals, want Copilot. Even if they are underwhelmed after using it, at that point, MS doesn't care. They already have your money.
I wish I could agree with this, but the ecosystem lock-in is too great. They might lose business for sure but it may not put a dent in their revenue at all.
If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smaller orgs it might be easier, but those don't pay Microsoft as much anyways.
From a user point of view, there are tools that have similar features, some even better features. G-suite is the only platform i know of that unifies all the office productivity products like 365 does. But neither G-suite nor any other platform can be managed/policed as well as 365. At the end of the day, will Google behave any better than Microsoft anyways (cost or otherwise)? And it isn't just policing and management but securing all that precious data in there, Microsoft might not be great but lots of tech-debt has gone into securing it within that platform. A migration would be costly, justifying it with cost savings alone might be difficult.
> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing.
There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.
There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.
But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.
But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.
But where will the next generation be shifted to?
Launched to Europe after Canada?
Then launched into Space?
It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.
That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.
Most of their enterprise clients get bundled services so it often still retains its competitive edge. Their Power suite, Teams and the existing integrations make it cost effective even with the increases.
I know that modern office has xlookup and other niceties, but if you're not a power user Office 97 off archive.org is like 200mb installed, works just fine on win 10 or under wine, and has the benefit of being written 28 years ago so on a modern computer everything happens imperceptibly fast. I installed the 97 suite like 2 or 3 years ago and I've never looked back.
Is there a reason to use this over LibreOffice? I had until this year a pretty old machine (~11-12 years old at time of replacement, upper midrange at time of purchase) and I never felt like it was slow -- possibly because everything was slow on that machine though and I was stuck in a forest...
XLOOKUP is so nice though.
The other stuff I can live without, especially the UI on data connections changing all the time and the connections breaking anyway.
Word 97 was basically feature complete though (if buggy - the same bugs persist today of course), including track changes and compare/merge documents. The killer feature now is being able to work on the same document with multiple people and seeing their changes in realtime. You used to be able to do this on-prem but that product (Office Online Server) got killed. I wonder why.
If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted. There is literally no benefit to this subscription model besides paying for what you already have and what you don't want. None of this stuff needs to be on the cloud even for bigger firms. For the I need/like X in Office 365, it's not worth it from a costs perspective.
Wow, I hadn’t heard about this before. I like that it’s FOSS with AGPL 3. The OnlyOffice screenshots of the spreadsheet application look beautiful (compared to the ugly LibreOffice Calc ones). It says that it works with ODS files (which LibreOffice Calc uses).
Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universities, etc.)
Considering the last price increase was almost 4 years before this one goes into effect, most of those are pretty modest 1-4%/year increases. In line with inflation. The notable outliers are F1 and F3 which got a lot more expensive
Apparently F1 and F3 are "Office 365 for Frontline Workers". F3 is kind of like Office 365 Basic, F1 is stripped down to mostly read-only access plus Microsoft Teams
At this point Microsoft office suite is practically a monopoly. Governments around the world rely on it. Every big enterprise and every business needs it.
The spec for office documents was authored by Microsoft( and approved by Microsoft!). The spec is basically the docx datastructure published publicly as a standard - which makes building competing office suites even harder.
Given the situation there isn't much customers can do if Microsoft decides to hike the prices anyhow they like.
Note: Indian Government recently adopted Zoho office suite to insulate themselves from Microsoft.
But I don't think many other governments or businesses have the guts to make such move.
The price increases seem reasonable (from 6 to 7, 12 to 14, etc) given inflation. Have they been increasing prices frequently or am I missing something?
I bought Microsoft Word, years ago, before it was "licensed". However, it auto-updated itself with my permission from time to time. A few weeks ago, I went to edit a document and was presented with a pop-up that said I needed to update my license fee in order to be allowed to make modifications to it.
This is doubly frustrating when Word is the standard for resumes.
The healthcare industry is basically locked into 365 due to a lack of alternatives supporting HIPAA.
Google Workplace theoretically can be configured, but it doesn't cover basic stuff like information in contacts. So if ANYONE in your organization (like an outreach coordinator) adds a patient and puts notes into the contact field, it's a HIPAA violation. There is no way to effectively police that.
I wish the regulations were written such that messaging apps, office suites, etc over a certain percentage of revenue had to qualify for HIPAA by default. It's absurd how many small shops just do everything in over WhatsApp/iMessage/Gmail/iCould, etc.
They can set whatever price they want. Most customers have no choice but to pay; there is no competitor with anything approaching full compatibility or a similar feature set.
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have maintained a business software monoculture for decades. Nobody has invested significant resources into competing products, just tiny companies and open source volunteers putting out niche alternatives. Microsoft could probably double their prices, and double the built-in advertising, and most customers would complain loudly and keep using them. Docx files, PSDs, PDF forms, etc with any complexity will only ever run properly in one corresponding proprietary application.
Then why don't they? I think it's precisely because they don't want anyone "investing significant resources into competing products"
There's a line for everyone and current prices obviously aren't too much for a majority of people, including me. I just don't stay subscribed when I'm not using it.
LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.
In the Netherlands I have spotted the first large company offering Nextcloud as an alternative: [0]
I'm thinking of pivoting my Bioinformatics services company to more of a "sovereign systems" provider. I build a ton of infra for a small startup, it's all Nucs and beefier systems throwing data around.
We need to create an office suite that really allows us to get rid of those milking corporations. I am not just thinking LibreOffice - I am actually thinking that an office suite can be used globally AND can also be at the least in part be co-funded by governments. The exact amount and procedure I omit here (can be many things), but it is no longer acceptable that a single greedy corporation keeps on milking schools for money.
(To those wondering why not LibreOffice - I am not saying not LibreOffice; but I am not sure how well LibreOffice's model fits to e. g. having a suite of office-related software that can be employed by every government, school, university, company etc... perhaps the code base is not well-written. Do we already have the co-editing functionality online? So that I could modify the document of an elderly person and then create a .pdf file. I can do so locally of course, but I want to be able to modify that on another, approved before-hand computer. Right now I have to carry an USB stick, and then modify locally, which is also possible, but I'd much prefer in-built solutions here. This is just one example of many many more. We need an improved LibreOffice here.)
>" One interpretation is that the extra $10 billion from the price increases will offset some of the red ink Microsoft is bleeding because of the investments they’re making in datacenter capacity, hardware, and software needed to make Copilot useful"
Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.
[+] [-] amanzi|3 months ago|reply
The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on.
Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible.
Take a look at the full feature list to get an idea of what's included: https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...
And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...
[+] [-] TheJoeMan|3 months ago|reply
There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed or was included in M365, and used PowerPoint as an everything-is-a-hammer crutch, and have now gotten jobs at Microsoft and are sticking with it.
Also, as far as I can tell, Publisher is the only application where the color-picker includes Pantone colors which is a must for professional poster production. I assume Microsoft is paying a licensing fee for this, and I wonder if they'll remember to cancel it.
Perhaps Affinity can eat their lunch and release a word-processor.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-publish...
[+] [-] Workaccount2|3 months ago|reply
SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
[+] [-] quantumwannabe|3 months ago|reply
Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
[+] [-] danpalmer|3 months ago|reply
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
[+] [-] everdrive|3 months ago|reply
In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete.
Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.
[+] [-] binarymax|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmic_cheese|3 months ago|reply
Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.
[+] [-] wvenable|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wilsonnb3|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|3 months ago|reply
Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.
[+] [-] ezconnect|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] acheong08|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|3 months ago|reply
Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.
> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
[+] [-] traceroute66|3 months ago|reply
Except there are not really any competitors if you look at the whole package.
A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange.
The fact you get the big-four (Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint) thrown in is really just icing on the cake.
[+] [-] sys_64738|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dfxm12|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] noosphr|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] notepad0x90|3 months ago|reply
If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smaller orgs it might be easier, but those don't pay Microsoft as much anyways.
From a user point of view, there are tools that have similar features, some even better features. G-suite is the only platform i know of that unifies all the office productivity products like 365 does. But neither G-suite nor any other platform can be managed/policed as well as 365. At the end of the day, will Google behave any better than Microsoft anyways (cost or otherwise)? And it isn't just policing and management but securing all that precious data in there, Microsoft might not be great but lots of tech-debt has gone into securing it within that platform. A migration would be costly, justifying it with cost savings alone might be difficult.
[+] [-] jgerrish|3 months ago|reply
There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.
There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.
But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.
But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.
But where will the next generation be shifted to?
Launched to Europe after Canada? Then launched into Space?
It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.
That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.
[+] [-] boh|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] emadb|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|3 months ago|reply
Likely they'd charge more for it.
[+] [-] bangaladore|3 months ago|reply
Nobody offers what Microsoft bundles here. From editors, to storage, to communication to identity to management.
And I say this as someone who hates dealing with Microsoft and their products.
[+] [-] mc32|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thot_experiment|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] GCUMstlyHarmls|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bux93|3 months ago|reply
Word 97 was basically feature complete though (if buggy - the same bugs persist today of course), including track changes and compare/merge documents. The killer feature now is being able to work on the same document with multiple people and seeing their changes in realtime. You used to be able to do this on-prem but that product (Office Online Server) got killed. I wonder why.
[+] [-] xnorswap|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] boh|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoWattenberg|3 months ago|reply
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
[+] [-] mrbluecoat|3 months ago|reply
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE
[+] [-] AnonHP|3 months ago|reply
Any gotchas to be aware of with OnlyOffice?
[+] [-] neop1x|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zerofor_conduct|3 months ago|reply
https://www.collaboraonline.com/comparing-collabora-with-onl...
[+] [-] puttycat|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|3 months ago|reply
Apparently F1 and F3 are "Office 365 for Frontline Workers". F3 is kind of like Office 365 Basic, F1 is stripped down to mostly read-only access plus Microsoft Teams
[+] [-] lewisjoe|3 months ago|reply
The spec for office documents was authored by Microsoft( and approved by Microsoft!). The spec is basically the docx datastructure published publicly as a standard - which makes building competing office suites even harder.
Given the situation there isn't much customers can do if Microsoft decides to hike the prices anyhow they like.
Note: Indian Government recently adopted Zoho office suite to insulate themselves from Microsoft.
But I don't think many other governments or businesses have the guts to make such move.
[+] [-] cfn|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] piker|3 months ago|reply
Must be for all those new useful features brought to your desktop over the last decade. Definitely not monopolistic rent-seeking. No siree.
If you or someone you love is a legal user and interested in checking out an in-development word processor built for lawyers, please consider Tritium.
It's free to download: https://tritium.legal/download or check out the web version: https://tritium.legal/preview
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 months ago|reply
This is doubly frustrating when Word is the standard for resumes.
[+] [-] indolering|3 months ago|reply
Google Workplace theoretically can be configured, but it doesn't cover basic stuff like information in contacts. So if ANYONE in your organization (like an outreach coordinator) adds a patient and puts notes into the contact field, it's a HIPAA violation. There is no way to effectively police that.
I wish the regulations were written such that messaging apps, office suites, etc over a certain percentage of revenue had to qualify for HIPAA by default. It's absurd how many small shops just do everything in over WhatsApp/iMessage/Gmail/iCould, etc.
[+] [-] gary_0|3 months ago|reply
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have maintained a business software monoculture for decades. Nobody has invested significant resources into competing products, just tiny companies and open source volunteers putting out niche alternatives. Microsoft could probably double their prices, and double the built-in advertising, and most customers would complain loudly and keep using them. Docx files, PSDs, PDF forms, etc with any complexity will only ever run properly in one corresponding proprietary application.
[+] [-] hypeatei|3 months ago|reply
Then why don't they? I think it's precisely because they don't want anyone "investing significant resources into competing products"
There's a line for everyone and current prices obviously aren't too much for a majority of people, including me. I just don't stay subscribed when I'm not using it.
[+] [-] bcrl|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|3 months ago|reply
I'm thinking of pivoting my Bioinformatics services company to more of a "sovereign systems" provider. I build a ton of infra for a small startup, it's all Nucs and beefier systems throwing data around.
[0] https://www.kpn.com/zakelijk/grootzakelijk/modern-workplace/...
[+] [-] shevy-java|3 months ago|reply
(To those wondering why not LibreOffice - I am not saying not LibreOffice; but I am not sure how well LibreOffice's model fits to e. g. having a suite of office-related software that can be employed by every government, school, university, company etc... perhaps the code base is not well-written. Do we already have the co-editing functionality online? So that I could modify the document of an elderly person and then create a .pdf file. I can do so locally of course, but I want to be able to modify that on another, approved before-hand computer. Right now I have to carry an USB stick, and then modify locally, which is also possible, but I'd much prefer in-built solutions here. This is just one example of many many more. We need an improved LibreOffice here.)
[+] [-] Havoc|3 months ago|reply
Already moved all my usage away from MS…now just need to persuade rest of fam
[+] [-] abixb|3 months ago|reply
Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.