Microsoft Urges Businesses To Abandon Office Perpetual Licenses 80
Microsoft is pushing businesses to shift away from perpetual Office licenses to Microsoft 365 subscriptions, citing collaboration limitations and rising IT costs associated with standalone software. "You may have started noticing limitations," Microsoft says in a post. "Your apps are stuck on your desktop, limiting productivity anytime you're away from your office. You can't easily access your files or collaborate when working remotely."
In its pitch, the Windows-maker says Microsoft 365 includes Office applications as well as security features, AI tools, and cloud storage. The post cites a Microsoft-commissioned Forrester study that claims the subscription model delivers "223% ROI over three years, with a payback period of less than six months" and "over $500,000 in benefits over three years."
In its pitch, the Windows-maker says Microsoft 365 includes Office applications as well as security features, AI tools, and cloud storage. The post cites a Microsoft-commissioned Forrester study that claims the subscription model delivers "223% ROI over three years, with a payback period of less than six months" and "over $500,000 in benefits over three years."
It is easier (Score:2)
Just have to log in to have MS Office on a new machine, which is way easier than installing and digging up the serial number.
MS recommends to Install Libreoffice (Score:5, Funny)
MS recommends to Install Libreoffice
No need for a licence
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Yep, that's what 90% of the people will do. That or Google Docs at a guess.
There's a set of MS Office ISOs on archive.org, if people are that tied to MS Office, there's some alternatives there, with the presumption that MSFT would have had them removed if it was a concern. Pirating the software was part of MSFTs success I think, people thought the software had value since it had a retail price.
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Unfortunately, apparently big companies still often stick to proprietary solutions for some reasons. I guess it must be something like "nobody ever got fired for using IBM or Microsoft". As an example, I heard that a lot of companies are switching away from VMWare after Broadcom acquired them but very few big companies are daring to choose proxmox and go with something else. Many smaller companies consider proxmox although. But, big companies with thousands of licenses is where the money is I guess.
As for m
Re:MS recommends to Install Libreoffice (Score:4, Informative)
I've had boss types in the past explain that the key issue is that the executive teams need to have someone suitably deep-pocketed that they can sue if things go sideways. If IT goes with a FOSS solution, and that solution falls through, all the egg is on the internal team's faces. If IT goes with a proprietary solution, there's at least some kind of hedge against any potential failure — suing the company that provides that proprietary solution.
Trying to walk through the logic of that has never been a satisfactory exercise for me. Somehow spending gobs of money on up-front purchases and ongoing licensing fees, plus all the hassle of fixes that may or may not ever materialize, customizations that cost an arm and a leg, and restrictions on how the software is used, seems to make more sense for them than software that costs nothing but your own time to maintain and even customize — time that you're spending anyway even with proprietary solutions.
Granted, I've never managed a large company, so I might just be ignorant of factors that I haven't included here. As far as what I can see, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. <shrug/>
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I've had boss types in the past explain that the key issue is that the executive teams need to have someone suitably deep-pocketed that they can sue if things go sideways. If IT goes with a FOSS solution, and that solution falls through, all the egg is on the internal team's faces. If IT goes with a proprietary solution, there's at least some kind of hedge against any potential failure — suing the company that provides that proprietary solution.
Yeah I thought I had covered that when I wrote: "nobody ever got fired for using IBM or Microsoft" but agreed, it was kind of implicit but being able to blame and sue somebody else should sure help not getting fired for buying a product. Anyway, yes I am perfectly aware of the phenomenon you stated.
Thanks for the precision.
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>"I've had boss types in the past explain that the key issue is that the executive teams need to have someone suitably deep-pocketed that they can sue if things go sideways."
And, yet, the reality is that the user license agreements with most proprietary software force you to give up most of your rights and ability to sue, or do so effectively. Not responsible for data loss. Not responsible for bugs or malfunction. Not liable for security. Etc. And if you do manage to get something to court, Microsof
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Not responsible for data loss. Not responsible for bugs or malfunction. Not liable for security. Etc. And if you do manage to get something to court,
Most of those contractual clauses can potentially be nullified by a judge in a given specific court case for various reasons.
Microsoft/etc will likely have *way* deeper pockets with *way* more prepared lawyers than your company to grind you into nothingness.
I worked on very big bids for very large outfits and believe me, those were on par with Microsoft lawyers competencies and monetary resources wise. Good point for small businesses although who should really consider more open source solutions and encouraging local small companies offering guidance and support services for those solutions.
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Has anyone ever managed to sue MS for whenever their SaaS went down? How about any of the cloud providers when they glitch and go down?
Cloudflare?
So, what are they paying for?
Re: MS recommends to Install Libreoffice (Score:3)
Better yet, why are you still using document formats intended for printers even though you have no intention of ever printing them? Where I work our documentation mostly exists in the form of something akin to a wiki. It's pretty rare that I even open MS word, so why on earth would I use libreoffice either?
I mean I guess if you really need spreadsheets or powerpoint then...ok... Though usually when I'm working with data, it's done with code instead of spreadsheets. Sure that requires an additional skill set
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"Where I work our documentation mostly exists in the form of something akin to a wiki."
What do you use to edit the wiki?
Re: MS recommends to Install Libreoffice (Score:2)
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In many if not most cases, I still prefer to work with dead tree copies of things when I can.
Easier for me to read and remember, especially when I can doodle in the margins, and make notes there....
Whe
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LibreOffice is painful to use for writing and editing. Poor autocorrect. Poor responses to editing. The interface confuses people. Google Docs has gotten a lot better recently, but only recently, as it gets more and more like MS Office. I pay for Google Workspace for the emails, but I use Office for actual work.
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First thing I turn off in Word.
Not sure what that means
Only because the ribbon menu was pushed so hard by MS for years now. The old menu and toolbar interface is what I like, it requires fewer clicks to use, takes up less screen space, and doesn't change every time the window is resized. I do customize the toolbar significantly to get it the way I like it, but that's not somet
Wonder how many "studies" (Score:5, Funny)
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There's just a small mistake in the report. The ROI goes in Microsoft's back pocket, not their customer's.
Laptops (Score:2)
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exist, fkheads.
VPN connections to the internal server too, if you need files you left at the office. It's like they're pretending the last forty years of computer innovation doesn't exist, because cloud.
Security features? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because nothing says "security" like tossing your critical business data onto a server open to the whole internet, accessible to every fool with a cell phone.
Re:Security features? (Score:5, Funny)
"But on the upside, you'll be paying us money every month!"
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Where are my mod points when I need one. Laugh out loud!
Re: Security features? (Score:2)
And with a license model that can be recalled at any moment.
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Why does it have to all be "critical business data"? Why not take a nuanced and risk based approach? Microsoft already offers tools in Office to do just that, the requirement to classify files and the ability to automatically block files form certain classifications from being cloud synced.
The reality is 99% of what people work with is not "critical business data". It's more run of the mill boring shit.
Re:Security features? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of these "limitations" to perpetual licenses are 100% due to changes Microsoft is making themselves to retroactively limit the software: patches making it difficult to use it, making it less stable, adding dependencies. And then, intentionally making data portability difficult by altering file formats.
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SCENE: INTERIOR HALLWAY.
DARTH GATER: "I have altered the format. Pray I do not alter it any further."
Re:Security features? (Score:5, Insightful)
"You may have started noticing limitations," Microsoft says in a post. "Your apps are stuck on your desktop, limiting productivity anytime you're away from your office. You can't easily access your files or collaborate when working remotely."
"You may have started noticing limitations. Your apps stop working every time there's a problem with the Internet, or an Azure outage, or a certificate expires. You can't do anything at all in these cases, but we don't care because we're still collecting your monthly payments".
just abandon MS Office & Windows completely (Score:5, Informative)
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LibreCalc is awful compared to Excel. I tried, really I did.
And when it comes to sharing documents, there is just a fear that it won't look right. I'm not going to risk sending a draft proposal to my boss, he opens it up in Word, and I seem like a clown because it doesn't look like it did on my system.
Re:just abandon MS Office & Windows completely (Score:4, Insightful)
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How terrible of you to fight FUD. Can't you see the shill?
I admit that it might also be that he's clueless, or worse can't format his/her/etc way out of a wet paper bag with a sharp wit.
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How terrible of you to fight FUD. Can't you see the shill?
Yeah I see a shill. You. That's what shill means right? Anyone with an opinion other than your own is automatically a shill for something or on the take right? Sorry but I agree with the GP. Calc is good in a pinch but it is woeful compared to Excel, not the least of which because it has virtually zero compatibility with 99% of data analytic tools and data sources used in the rest of the industry.
I do use Calc at home though. Don't need to pay M$ a subscription fee when all you need to do is note down a sho
Re:just abandon MS Office & Windows completely (Score:4, Informative)
IME, Excel is easier to get good results in. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of the modern interface, and I have also found it to be crashy and unreliable these days. It was never immune from explosion, but you used to have to lean on it. Calc has come a long way, and while its interface still isn't great, I mostly prefer it to Excel. I only really wish it had live pivot tables.
Though nobody asked, Writer is much better than Word.
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I like it too, but the graphing is still lacking.
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I'm not going to risk sending a draft proposal to my boss, he opens it up in Word, and I seem like a clown because it doesn't look like it did on my system.
I think the point was for the switch to be organization-wide, so your boss would be using LibreOffice, too. ;-)
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Re: just abandon MS Office & Windows completel (Score:2)
JFC ain't that the truth. I've got one that's got Photoshop CS3 on his machine. All his entire computing concern is that he never lose that install because he lost the license/serial long ago.
I put The GIMP on there along side it and told him he should start learning it just in case, but only Photoshop CS3 will ever do for him. It seems to be causing a problem with the new versions of Acrobat Pro (constant popup error messages, I haven't been able to resolve it without touching the ancient Photoshop), a pie
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What does he use Photoshop for? Cropping images and adding text labels like "A" and "B."
Wow.... you can do that using the free Irfanview. He'll have to give up PS someday...
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Oh really? I much prefer Librecalc to Excel. Cut and paste works sensibly for one thing, and that's huge.
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If you are that paranoid about presentation accuracy... which isn't reliable even between different versions of Microsoft office by the way... then send it as a PDF. Your boss doesn't want to scroll around in your cells anyway.
Linus tech tips tried to get off Adobe (Score:2)
This is not an accident. Adobe is a huge company. So is Microsoft. Both of them are going to have people whose job is to analyze the competition and determine how much value that competition could potentially add and then price their products accordingly. This isn't 1985 anymore and companies don't leave stuff like that up to chan
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Learning curve for what, using a mouse and the save/open icons?
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I wanted to like Libre Office. I tried really hard.
Unfortunately, there is a 15+ year old bug that no one wants to fix, regarding the way it handles localization. Your options are 1) accept every aspect of your country's localization, including, in my case, the retarded American date format that I detest. 2) accept every aspect of some other country's localization. 3) figure out where the hell the localization settings are, edit them, and compile the Windows binaries yourself.
There have been numerous ti
They would like to charge you by keystroke (Score:3)
Beware, Microsoft (Score:2)
Your heavy-handed pursuit of profit will cost you the very profit you seek. You want more people switching to Linux?
Have you seen Windows 11? (Score:4, Funny)
I think the answer is "yes, please do!"
They've even prepared their users by making the UI look like a shitty linux desktop environment.
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>"I think the answer is "yes, please do!""
Yep
>"They've even prepared their users by making the UI look like a shitty linux desktop environment."
There is no single "UI" look of a Linux desktop environment like there is in MS-Windows. You can choose to make Linux look however you want. Although choice can make things challenging, choice is rarely a bad thing. But it can be shocking to MS-Windows users, even the concept that when using Linux, one can completely change the way the desktop works or look
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What they are saying (Score:3, Informative)
What i read it as give us more money per month or year and we will make it more expensive several times a year
Additional Microsoft Profit (Score:2)
Over $500,000 in benefits (Score:2)
Even for a one seat license for a sole proprietor business? And will they make up the difference if I document less benefits? Or whom do I sue?
I could make a decent living, setting up small businesses, buying a 365 license for each and then collecting for promised but unrealized "benefits".
Did they mix up their note cards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your apps are stuck on your desktop
That's a feature, not a bug.
limiting productivity anytime you're away from your office.
Lots of the people they're selling to pitched the benefits of return-to-office mandates, so this too sounds like a feature, not a bug.
You can't easily access your files or collaborate when working remotely.
Because this wasn't a solved problem with VPNs and RDP, or Dropbox or Nextcloud, a decade ago...
security features
vague...
AI tools
Clippy and Cortana didn't excite anyone; Copilot won't, either...
and cloud storage.
You can't get more than 5TB of storage in Microsoft365 at any price.
"223% ROI over three years, with a payback period of less than six months" and "over $500,000 in benefits over three years."
For Microsoft shareholders, probably. For folks who realized that Office has been basically feature complete since 2010, that there sounds like some Hollywood Accounting. I'd call it Microsoft Accounting, but that was discontinued in 2009.
Re:Did they mix up their note cards? (Score:4, Insightful)
While you make some good points, it also sounds like your way of working is stuck in 2015. VPNs, sitting in offices, that shit is gone. These days you expect to be able to open your corporate files on your personal BYOD iPad and work while commuting. They expect you to be able to effortlessly join a Teams call from your device when your internet goes down.
I've been around for a while. I've seen it all, working in thin clients, working on desktops locally, assigning all company people with VPNs to access files remotely, now the cloud... I can definitely say that regardless of what anyone else thinks I find real benefit to doing my job by having things on the almighty cloud. Is it worth the money? Fuck knows that's my company's problem not mine.
You can't get more than 5TB of storage in Microsoft365 at any price.
No *you* can't. They are talking to businesses, they can get what they want, for a price.
Clippy and Cortana didn't excite anyone; Copilot won't, either...
This I also don't agree with. But not for reasons you think. Copilot is exciting. It's exciting to see what an utter piece of shit turd MS has shoehorned into every one of its stupid Microsoft 365 applications. It's the bane of my existence and it fucking spams you to use it constantly. For all the benefits I just mentioned about the cloud, this here is the biggest downside.
Re: Did they mix up their note cards? (Score:2)
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And yet you're objectively wrong. Most companies explicitly do allow that, and address your concerns specifically through a combination of Azure Information Protection, Mobile Device Management, and/or DRM that is baked right into products.
MDM: Virtually all companies that allow BYOD require enrollment into MDM that gives IT a level of control over remote wiping / managing the device.
DRM: Microsoft 365 allows IT to specify which files are savable vs which are viewable. For example I can open and edit a Word
Re: Did they mix up their note cards? (Score:2)
Clearly you didn't read the story of the Disney worker who loaded an AI tool on his personal machine and now his career is ruined because w
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By "collaborate" I assume they mean things like multiple users editing the same spreadsheet simultaneously. That seems to be a prevalent use case, 2 out of my last 3 jobs utilized that heavily. It's the only killer feature in O365 as far as I can see.
I know you can do this on Google Docs as well, but I'm not sure that's any better. MS at least gives you a warning when they EOL products.
Nope... not doing it (Score:3)
Color me shocked... (Score:2)
Business recommends switching from something that you pay for once and keep forever to something you have to subscribe to with ongoing monetization.
Have to Make Up for AI Losses (Score:2)
Microsoft has to squeeeeeze out more revenue to make up for the AI losses. AI is losing everyone money.
LINUX - ROI (Score:2)
I've been using exclusively Linux since 1999. I know, I'm "older".
In that time I've spent $0 on Windows 2000, ME, Vista, XP, 7, 8, 10, don't "have to upgrade hardware" to 11, etc.
I've spent $0 on Office anything, haven't had my files HACKED 5 TIMES in 2019 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/10/02/microsoft-office-365-email-hacker-made-millions-heres-how/) or ever, and have switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice only once. No hardship. no regrets.
I use my 2005 Dell XPS-13 for travel, have a
To be fair? (Score:3)
If you're a typical business? It's not usually a big deal to pay these subscription fees for your software vs buying up-front "perpetual licenses". Every place I've worked and had anything to do with the I.T. budget -- they have a line item for estimated annual expenses for the software, and it's easier and more predictable for everyone involved if there's some known monthly fee, vs a much larger unknown fee to buy a new version of a program for all of your users, when you hit an obstacle of your existing one not doing things you need.
Where these subscriptions really hurt are your "mom and pop" shops and residential users. Families and small shops usually don't really need the new features packed into the latest releases of programs like Office. They're still just using the basics and they usually only feel forced to upgrade because other people around them did, and Microsoft purposely made it difficult to share documents back and forth between the versions. (Whoever runs the newer release has to keep remembering to purposely save everything in a backwards-compatible format.)
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If you're a big business, you'll save money going with a M365 subscription over a perpetual license.
Why? Because M365 is licensed per user, while Office is licensed per-computer. M365 allows up to 5 PCs to use the same license (which may include a personal install on the user's home PC), while office perpetual is licensed just on that PC.
If you've got an employee with a desktop and a laptop, they're going to have to have 2 perpetual office licenses, or one subscription. Given the costs are roughly the same
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That's a feature not a bug (Score:3)
Yes, oh God fucking forbid office notifications and work not follow us on the road home, into the dining room, onto the sofa, into bed and when we're out in nature.
And besides that... I'm not saying I haven't used connectbot on my phone if literally all I need to do is login into X and run one or two short commands, but have you ever tried doing actual real work with a phone or tablet instead of a legitimate desktop computer? In about sixty seconds you'll be wanting to suck start a shotgun. It's excruciating.
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I found it impossible to do on a phone, but just managable on a Galaxy Tab S2 w/ vpn software and an RDP client.
Nothing new from Microsoft (Score:2)
That's some impressive customer resistance there.
And some equally impressive "bashing their heads against a brick wall" from Microsoft.
Weird (Score:2)
I have been urging them to stop messing up core Office products for years, yet they persist.
Letter to Microsoft (Score:2)
Dear Microsoft,
Please tell us how switching to something that provides you with vastly increased revenues will save us money.
Sincerely,
Everyone.
LibreOffice (Score:3)
I can do quite a bit with just LibreOffice. Maybe some people need more than that, a lot of people don't.
But in Microsoft's defense, businesses pay for CRMs, wikis, etc already. Half of my writing I do on Confluence because it is easy to share and organize between multiple teams. That costs money too.
New and improved (Score:1)
Go to hell Microsoft (Score:2)
And the worst part is that there's always a complete imbecile within the corporations who swallows this shit hook, line and sinker and still manages to convince the bosses that it has to be applied by force to all other employees.
Not likely (Score:2)
At my workplace (public administration) we have a lot of PCs still using Office 2016, some with 2013 and even very few with 2010, all of them with perpetual licenses. With subscription, we would pay trough the nose for those. And the argument that we could have all those installs up to date to the latest version doesn't hold... the PCs would not be powerful enough to run latest Windows and Office.
Windows (Score:2)
Dear Microsoft,
My next PC will be Linux again (Slackware desktop for 10 years many years ago). This is because you managed to take 7 and break it, give us 8 which was malleable into a working 7 again, take that and give us 10 which was better, then break that with 11 - despite telling us there would be no more versions - and now you have worked incessantly to make my life more difficult and my productivity significantly less and shove me towards subscription and cloud services which I do not want and have
in other words (Score:2)
citing collaboration limitations..they created (Score:2)
Fuck M$! (Score:2)
I think this timeline is a result of having Young Kirk destroy a '67 'Vette.