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.
> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive.
I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.
And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope.
Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
You are looking from the perspective of a user of the software - sure, these have enough feature parity to "compete".
But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives.
How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking work? How does audit work? And that's just the surface.
Needs for large enterprises, where you cannot just have John from HR make a new account for the new hire, are often not met by the opensource world.
Starting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose.
Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads.
The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers.
Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.
Yeah, but they're already gone, and you can only milk them for so much. Businesses and governments are a totally different matter: they're not going to switch to the alternatives no matter what, so MS could make a lot more profit by jacking up their prices massively. $10,000 per user per year is totally doable I think.
Don't underestimate the rage from citizens who receive important documents and sheets in formats they can't open. Or you can open them but with a warning that some functionality might be lost. (reads like: you might go to prison)
I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally.
Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
> It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck.
Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.
> not economical viable
I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
I just did a major refactor of a project to move it many versions up on a framework and whole process was effectively vibe coded. I'd estimate I did in a couple of days what would have taken a couple of weeks.
That's good and expect that could be shaved down even more. I was spending most of time just waiting for it do the work.
But I don't know if that fundamentally changes the situation or not. We've had steady improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.
A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember.
Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications.
It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.
As much as everyone complains about Microsoft Office the historic alternatives were all much worse and eventually all collapsed under their own weight.
Companies that had a successful niche, like Lotus, failed to keep up.
You're not kidding! I did a deep dive into this a few months ago, and the alternative situation was dismal! LibreOffice is the closest, but its performance has room for improvement.
Exactly - that's what I was trying point out in my original comment. The desktop office apps are actually reasonably easy to swap out for a large portion of people. It's the rest of the M365 suite which is massive.
and, its so cheap. there are alternatives for individual components, but nothing that comes close to being this low cost. And, the ultimate value is that if you buy a niche tool (like notion) then only people with licenses can use it. Everybody at the company has office, so it's easy to share/collaborate. You have to really commit to avoiding office at all if you're going to replace parts of it.
Reverse argument is true as well..
If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.
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.
A lot of this seems to be related to death of the amateur and semi-pro DTP industries:
1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions).
2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc.
I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death).
No-one will pay for it, but the presence of Publisher, as a tool that people know and use, in the Office Suite, would probably be a substantial feature for many people.
Which is funny because here in Seattle there is starting to be a resurgence of DTP to some degree. But it's very underground and, being already in a tech hub, likely very niche from a macroeconomics viewpoint.
> And for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
There isn't because any serious print shop will laugh you out the door if you come to them with a Publisher file.
Publisher is fine for home/office printing, and you will probably get away with it at your local corner shop that does digital printing on a Xerox box in the back of the shop.
But if you're sending stuff off to the big-boys you will suddenly find yourself needing to adhere to artwork preflight settings, colour profiles, PDF and TAC specs.
Not only will the printer give you validation settings files you can load into Acrobat and Indesign, but if there are issues, the printer's preflight team will be more willing (and able !) to help you if you are using industry-standard tools.
I'm pretty sure they not only show up with a PowerPoint file, but one with missing/nonembedded fonts, web images, perhaps even a video in there somewhere. At least that's been my experience with people sending me stuff to print.
When I did IT work for my university, I was in charge of a big plotter printer that the science students used to print posters with summaries of their research for conferences. The only format I ever got was PowerPoint. Based on the number of search results for "powerpoint research poster template", it looks like this PowerPoint is still the format of choice.
I never really thought about it, but it is kind of odd that the same community that loves using LaTeX for document formatting and typesetting research papers is also using PowerPoint as a desktop publishing substitute.
They probably meant Publisher, which was a part of every more expensive MS Office deal. It was simple to use and much more suitable than Word for simple design jobs (business cards, leaflets, stationary, etc) and with which the "average" MS Office user could now do what was once the domain of DTP "professionals".
Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that?
The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there.
I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too.
It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?
I'm going to imagine anyone who needs to make fold-out leaflets is going to end up either doing it in Creative Cloud (i.e. InDesign), or these days, will just do it in Figma or Canva.
Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).
PowerPoint is probably the replacement because it doesn't restrict where things can be placed (at least not by default). Word would be much more suitable, if only they made and advertised some sort of DTP mode that would do away with the image position defaults and let users put things over margins.
Do you mean changed the default text box / picture / drawing canvas mode from "in line" to "in front of text" (which lets you put it anywhere, including over margins)? You actually can do that in advanced options. "DTP mode" sounds like marketing overkill for a simple option but maybe it would help.
You need more than a template if you're going to make a booklet by folding a piece of paper in 4 - half of the "pages" (quarter pages) need to be upside down.
In truth, I haven't tried this in Word either, although it appears to be possible in page setup. Maybe I just stopped using Publisher when I started getting duplex printers. Or even stopped needing silly layouts for school projects.
I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".
Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.
What's crazier is that it actually stops working if installed.
Of the last two times I had to make a flyer, one of the two I pulled up PowerPoint to accomplish. It's not a completely outlandish direction. They should add a Publisher mode that transforms the interface for print document design.
Not to worry. Once they unleash those AI enhanced vibe programmers that are doing %33 more programming on this problem all will be good. The AI is already helping them to become more profitable by making it necessary to charge more for their product. The sky's the limit. Or Skynet's the limit;)
This one caught me by surprise. Publisher is a really great tool to create internal documents…reminds me of the Adobe Fireworks fiasco. They force you to use a tool of which you only need 5% and pay an increase cost (time and subscription) 500%.
I mean, Powerpoint, really? That app should’ve been gone a long time.
Weird that with as much as they're pushing Co-Pilot everywhere, they for some reason can't use it to maintain Publisher. Maybe Co-Pilot isn't as good as Microsoft claims.
I used Scribus. Top choice for replacing Publisher by open source software. Scribus is very intuitive and with enough time I could churn out a beautiful looking effective resume on my first try
I was thinking the same thing about people seemingly not knowing about Publisher.
And I always found those memes about photos moving around your text annoying, because that it literally what you want when making a document (you know, what Word is designed for) (but you can just change the behaviour if you want a different layout anyway).
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.
About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again.
I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".
I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).
I didn't really want to resort to piracy; I think it's stupid that Adobe won't sell a perpetual license.
I got a license to Moho from a Humble Bundle like a year ago, and I think Toonz is open source nowadays, all in addition to the ToonBoom copy I have so I probably don't need the real Adobe Animate anymore.
Can confirm as someone who was using pre-subscription Office to write/read files while everyone else at work was using the 365 version. Now that I'm using 365 too, I do however appreciate the ability to do shared live editing in the office programs.
I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.
I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.
The pace has probably slowed down, but problem isn't so much that they're not adding anything, it's that the additions are either somewhat niche (e.g., new Excel formulas), don't work as well as they should (e.g., syncing), or are confusing (e.g., the new Outlook that lives alongside "classic" Outlook).
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.
I don't know, I have been forced to update many times just to use Word. Win7/Word 2003 was working fine for me as a math editor. Somehow everyone changes to .docx, Equation Editor 3.0 was replaced, then one of my major client only accept Word 2019 files for consistency so I was forced to update to Windows 10 just to use that.
And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.
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.
This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
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.
> 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.
There's no substance to this comment. It's pure speculation. If you actually want to look at evidence, look at the recent news that Microsoft has cut AI sales targets in half.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
It’s not ironic at all. Posting here was deliberate to highlight the bubble that happens here for consumer products. This comment section has a lot of people evaluating these price hikes as if they were targeted at HN individual users, not for a product targeted at a different audiences and corporate subscriptions.
Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market.
Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
As for AI demand: If you don’t think AI is in demand, you haven’t been looking at the explosive adoption of AI tools from ChatGPT to Sora (consistently high on app charts) by consumers. These products are in high demand, though you’d never know if it your only perspective was through upvoted HN stories and comments.
> Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, we can be out of touch a lot of the time, but I kind of hate that this has become the "smoking gun" to dismiss comments on Hacker News. Yes, one person was wrong about Dropbox and said that they could just use an FTP server. Yes, people on here agreed with that person. Yes, sometimes our ability to do things low level blinds us to the fact that the majority of people can't or simply don't want to.
That said, most of the negative feedback people get for these things is actually good feedback, and most of the time when people say a project can be accomplished by doing XYZ, that's usually a valid point. Technical people can absolutely be out of touch (and I'm probably worse than average about it), but that doesn't automatically mean that a comment on HN is invalid or useless.
While saying "no one wants" the AI features might be a bit of hyperbole, I don't think it's super out of touch, and this is evidenced by the fact that a lot of the VC money for AI ventures is drying up. AI is neat and here to stay, but I think a large chunk of society is coming to terms with the fact that it's not nearly as cool as it was promised to us, and getting a little annoyed with how much AI crap is being thrown at us. YouTube is getting filled with low-effort AI video and AI voice and AI script bullshit, the average web page is turning a tinge of yellow from all the AI generated images that seem to be all over the place, searching is getting almost as bad as it was in 2005 when "SEO" became a thing because of all the AI generated blogs designed to steal clicks. None of this stuff is relegated to the technical crowd, this is stuff even normies have to deal with.
And within the scope of HN, I'm sure all of us are getting a little tired of having to review pull requests with huge chunks of clearly-AI-generated code that the writer doesn't really and are large enough to not be realistically reviewable with a lot of shitty, low-effort code.
I broadly agree with you but the AI demand part is more nuanced. Demand is very large for consumer-ish apps like ChatGPT and Sora, but even Claude, which is huge for coding and arguably the best model right now, is tiny. I've had an interaction with someone nontechnical who, after seeing the Claude logo bounce, asked me why my ChatGPT had fireworks.
Yeah, the demand is there, but I have a hard time believing nontechnical people are clamoring for Copilot, they likely don't even know such a thing exists. The market is insane right now.
> but even Claude, which is huge for coding and arguably the best model right now, is tiny. I've had an interaction with someone nontechnical who, after seeing the Claude logo bounce, asked me why my ChatGPT had fireworks
So they had used ChatGPT enough to recognize that you were using a different tool?
I don’t see this as contradicting anything. Even the nontechnical people in your life are familiar with these tools because they’re using them.
When was the last price hike? Looking at historical inflation and working backwards, you only need to start at around late 2021 to get 16% cumulative inflation. In other words if they didn't raise their prices for 4 years, they'd be at par with inflation.
>Since when does any organization factor in inflation for renewals from vendors?!
Don't ask me, ask the person who posed the question of inflation in the first place. That said...
>All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way. Inflation affects everything in the economy, so a company that doesn't raise prices in line with it is losing money. Even SaaS businesses with low marginal costs aren't exempt, because they still need to pay salaries for developers and support staff, both of which roughly track inflation. Therefore if business see price hikes that raise with inflation, they can assume that competitors will raise prices as well, and it's not going to be worth switching unless they're already on the fence for some other reason.
Percentages are fun because they can make something with a small absolute change look like a giant change.
No business is really going to care about $1.00/user, especially when it costs hundreds of dollars per user (or thousands) to migrate entirely away from the Microsoft ecosystem.
How much inflation has there been since the last price increase? From 2022 to 2025 it look likes like about 11%, so not all that different if you're trying to keep a round number.
The average australian customer managed to get angry enough that the ACCC is working to force a slop free variant and a refund for everyone dark patterned into upgrading.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
You're completely right about this. But how does the Venn diagram look for features between different Office versions and for customer needs? Another commenter here said that Office 98 is good enough for most users, and I have to agree.
What reason is there today for somebody to upgrade from a 10 or 15 year old version of Office? Is Copilot it?
I've managed a very information-intensive career so far without using MS Office. Apple's iWork software is perfectly fine. And I'm not avoiding Office out of any principle. If I needed or wanted it, I'd be happy to pay for it.
People here do seem to miss that they added this relatively big feature. The problem for Microsoft is that Google Docs also has collaborative editing, and in my experience, it actually works better.
For end-users maybe, but for the business' IT who get a working mail server they don't have to mess with, and a whole remote work and videoconferencing package that "just works" and most people already know how to use, it's a hell of a deal.
Kind of hard to understand what it does that Google Workspace + Zoom (or any other provider) doesn't?
I'm seeing a very common pattern of Google Workspace + Google Meet, Zoom seats for people who need to remotely control computers, and then Slack or ones of its competitors for chat.
Teams has annoyingly some lock in value for 365. Nobody should prefer Exchange Online over Exchange though, Microsoft is too unreliable of a service provider.
> 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.
I didn't mean to imply Germany isn't independent and at the same time we can't trust our allies. It's mostly that the monster game puts risk downstream too. And some have it really bad if you're going for citizenship. I know, it seems like it's just a fucking Office Suite.
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.
in corporate america, it's everywhere, to the point where people's compromised accounts being used to send phishing content via sharepoint/onedrive is extremely common. It is (rightfully) highly encouraged as well due to their built-in data loss prevention stuff (Microsoft information protection/MIP), it's the only reasonable way I've seen to get a handle on secret documents/content/slides from leaking too much.
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.
Zoho is crap. Sure, on the tin it comes with 64 different things, but many are poorly integrated and feature set is just enough to be like "Yes, we have that feature."
Interesting. I know I'm not a very demanding user of word processing or presentation software. But I've been using zoho for basic business stuff for one of my businesses since 2019, and I wouldn't call it crap. It's not amazing, but I pay something like $12/user/year. And I get shared docs/sheets/decks + pretty decent email. And their transactional email service (zeptomail) is actually top notch IMO.
What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?
I am a home user, but I use Zoho's paid email service as a backup and alternative to Gmail and Outlook, and it is pretty decent and extremely affordable.
Probably been about 2 years since I was forced to last use it but with amount of slop being added, their development priorities would have to massively changed.
Libre Office Calc is pretty similar to Excel for general use. For importing csv files it has always been superior to Excel. Some niche areas in Calc are also better than Excel. Inflexible users are locked into Excel, but for general purpose use Calc is all you need.
Libre Office is great for replicating what Excel did 10 years ago. Excel has a lot of things that power users use (like Power Query) that Libre Office simply isn't even trying to replicate.
When developers tell me that I could use Calc rather than Excel, I ask them if they would be OK being forced to use Emacs or Vim, whichever is the opposite of what they spent the last decade perfecting.
For legacy spreadsheets, you're 100% correct. I'll need to keep a version of Excel around forever. If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want, a perpetual license to Office 2019 runs about $20 and will do that job for me.
For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
> If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want [...]
In case you aren't aware, when they try to sneak Copilot onto your plan you can get rid of it by going to your plan management page and canceling. One of the offers they should offer to try to get you to stay is your old plan without Copilot.
That depends on your workload. I've been using Excel since 1993, and I find the things I've listed help me get things done just as well as Excel does, unless I have a pile of macros and vbscript I need to interop with.
This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.
Have to disagree. It depends on what you are doing. That the alternatives can be replacements, including the open source ones, is relative and should be looked at as a percentage.
If you listed out all the things that Excel can do, we might find that the alternative is at 80% or so (just a number), with some additional things that Excel can't do. That 80% could be good enough to switch. It should not be looked at as "all or nothing", especially for every person or business.
The solution is actually just not using Excel. If you're essentially using Excel as a LOB backend and database, that should probably not be in Excel.
It's fine if you have a few formulas. As soon as you're busting out macros it's time to sunset the workbook and make an application. There's a lot of God Excel workbooks sitting around on share drives with no audibility or quality control.
Yes, there's many many cases that should likely not be using Excel.
But given that Excel is the second-best tool for everything, world runs on it.
And when you try to build systems to replace Excel for a specific task, you quickly learn how extremely powerful Excel is and how hard is to replace it and add value that customers would care about.
I've been there, the problem is that replacements are not as versatile or "floppy". But that's also a good thing, because Excel is too versatile to the point where most workbooks are filled with bugs on top of bugs and nobody cares.
Yes, bugs in sheets are worst part of excel, by far.
But many end users prefer dealing with bugs than with inflexible software that doesn’t understand all the different ways how real world is messy and hard to model.
I hate using Excel. But I 100% understand why world runs on it.
I want to love these, mostly because they're FOSS and Office/Google Spreadsheets seems to get more and more bloated, and subsequently slower.
But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
Many would say that the FOSS alternatives don't copy Office enough. Often, by going there own way with various tasks, they create a bigger jump. Case in point, the Linux distros that attract the most attention for common folk and not niche use, are the ones that are more Windows-like. Examples: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, etc... The smaller the jump, the more you can convince people to switch over.
When there is a significant difference, it needs to be shown what the equivalent is in the alternative. The jump can be a bit mitigated by education or information, but usually by only so much, where it's still seen as attractive.
I think the main issue for most people is that the layout is slightly different, probably to help prevent microsoft from suing them.
But once you get used to those differences, (also, knowing that there are a handful of themes that can shorten the difference significantly) then it becomes a non-issue after less than 10 hours of use.
LibreOffice seems to have an optional ribbon-like interface for the people that happen to like it (View -> User Interface) (but I don't use this UI mode as I personally find ribbon-like UIs hard to work with).
Yeah, that's the opposite of what I want, then I'll just continue using Excel... What I want is for someone to figure out a better UI and better UX, not just copy what's out there.
My hot take on a better excel: the two things excel sucks at: version control and syncing. On the backend, separate the data and the logic in the spreadsheet and put each into version control. Then use something like syncthing to share documents with colleagues. You might also need something like bitmessage for initial handshake. Now you have a spreadsheet you can collaborate on in real time over the Internet or LAN without screwing around with a server, a google account, a credit card etc.
There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.
I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...
Yes, but take OpenOffice off the list, development has slowed to a glacial pace and it’s close to abandoned in favour of LibreOffice, which is actively maintained.
Looks like there was finally a OpenOffice release recently but that was after years of people complaining of security vulnerabilities not fixed in the release version.
My problem is the knee-jerk "Google will sell/read our data" that suggesting any of their suite seems to engender. It doesn't really matter what Google says in their contracts, too many executives trust them less than MSFT.
Agreed that their actual products seem to work fine for almost everyone.
I think the only way to get the no-Copilot version now is to already have the Copilot version and try to cancel your subscription, and only then they'll offer the "Classic" version sans Copilot as a last ditch retention effort. If users actually wanted this stuff they wouldn't need to bury the option to not pay for it.
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.
I'd disagree in terms of the cloud capabilities. When it is used properly. The cloud stuff is very useful. I currently have a document that is going through multiple versions with about 8 people, with different expertise collaborating. Some have edit privs, some only have review. The ability for everyone to work on it simultaneously, with version history and no more document-v12-copy3_FINAL_FINALv2 is most welcome.
If you heavily rely on Word and PowerPoint. I know several companies that almost never use those products except in limited situations (legal, keynote presentation etc). All "regular" discussions/presentations take place on Confluence/Notion/Quip etc. I wish my company did the same thing.
I think a surprising number of companies only survive because Microsoft Office gets around hostile internal IT departments and gives workers capabilities they can’t otherwise get on their locked down workstations.
It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.
Ah yes security, the ultimate shakedown mechanic. Tony Soprano should've been in software sales. "You don't want anything happen to your nice little business do you??"
Bullshit. Just from a document editing perspective, going back to a network share where only one person can edit a doc is not going to fly. I used to have to deal with this as IT/desktop support and it fucking sucked. Docs in the cloud give you better collab capabilities and remove the need to have fancy networking, VPNs, international security exclusion groups etc, domain controller bullshit, connecting all of the companies offices together. Connect to the Internet, and all your stuff is there no matter where you are. It sounds like you've never had to support the infra for office workers before. This is way better than it used to be. For a small company, sure, do whatever. But the bigger it gets, the harder all that shit becomes and requires a lot of work to keep it running.
> If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted.
But what about the impact of increased productivity when not having to deal with the garbage that are New Teams and New Outlook? The employees would start doing more in lesser time and the companies could potentially make more profits too. Why would they want that if they could just be locked in with Microsoft month-on-month? /s
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.)
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.
For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.
I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Document Foundation so that it can get better, but it moves very slowly.
I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.
LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.
Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.
Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.
And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.
Calc has many features focused on correctness and reliability. Excel is a joke on both of those accounts.
Turns out close to 100% of the spreadsheet users out there don't care about that. It's unnerving and absurd, and IMO, what is even the point of all the effort of entering your data and working it if you don't care about the result being correct? But that's how the world is.
For an individual, probably not. I've been an OpenOffice and LibreOffice use for my personal use and contracting business since 2004. I've had no need for "real" Microsoft Office in that time. I also don't deal in macro-encrusted documents or with more esoteric features.
For an org where individual users aren't technical I'd never try to get by w/o Microsoft Office. The assumption by all large orgs. that you're going to use Microsoft Office is pervasive. Even if the Free Office suites work fine tech support is always going to be mired down in compatibility issues, both real and perceived.
Power Query + Power Pivot + M. I don't use formulas in cells. The sheets are just a canvas for Pivot Tables, final tables, and charts connected to the data from Power Query and Pivot.
I deal with hundreds of API integrations involving various JSON, CSV, TSV, and XML files with mixed validity. My workflow: Notepad++ for a visual check -> Prototype everything in Excel. I give users a "visual", connect it to real data, and only then migrate the final logic to BI dashboards or databases.
Nothing else delivers results this fast. SQL, BI tools, and Python are too slow because they generally need "clean" data. Cleaning and validation take too much time there. In Excel, it's mostly just a few clicks.
PS: I spent 2 years (2022-2023) using LibreOffice Calc. I didn't touch Excel once, thinking I needed to break the habit. In the end, I did break the habit, but it was replaced by a pile of scripts and utilities because Calc couldn't do what I needed (or do it fast enough). The experience reminds me of testing Krita for 2 years (2018-2020) — I eventually returned to Adobe Photoshop (but that's another story).
PS2: About (Query + Pivot + BI). This allows you to process millions of rows (bypassing grid limitations). It also allows you to compress everything into an OLAP cube, taking up little space and working quickly with data.
Interesting. I'm not experienced in data cleaning.
About Python vs Excel:
Isn't manual cleanning of data in Excel prone to permanent error? Because:
- it's hard to version control/diff
- it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells
- it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git
In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess.
>When Visicalc was released, Perez became convinced that it was the ideal user interface for his visionary product: the Functional Database. With his friend Jose Sinai formed the Sinper Corporation in early 1983 and released his initial product, TM/1 (the "TM" in TM1 stands for "Table Manager"). Sinper was purchased by Applix in 1996, which was purchased by Cognos in late 2007, which was in itself acquired mere months later by IBM.[3][2]
TM1 is widely used as a way to interface with official ledgers.
Yup, I have. And had to deal with converting "this awesome tool that does X, Y and Z" to an actual multi-user app because it was just so great. You end up discovering that there are tons of miscalculations in these formulas that only surface when you start writing tests for them, and that a lot of the business decisions based on these tools had flawed assumptions.
Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
My first job out of uni was developing a devops pipeline for Excel spreadsheets after one went rogue and cost the broker trader I was hired by $10m in one fun afternoon.
An application I consulted on was a web interface that made heavy use of the Excel portions of Microsoft Graph so that the finance team could continue to send clients spreadsheets that they could adjust without also sending them the formulas to "steal" (and take other parts of their business elsewhere, to noticeable millions of dollars of project spending habit shifts). The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"), so it was wildly custom solution to figure out where formulas existed in any of the spreadsheets finance felt like giving to the app, build a custom UI for entering the inputs to those formulas, run those formulas most with Microsoft Graph cloud magic/some with other web libraries, and return the results.
If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
I would like to see the finance team that codes all their own C code and is adamant it needs to be in Emacs, especially because if they are that deep in Emacs I'd be wondering why they are insisting on C rather than Emacslisp or something even more esoteric like GNU Guile or someone's custom Forth to Fortran compiler…
But to answer the question, that is where I finished. We weren't "okay with it" that the finance team insisted on a C# to Excel files in SharePoint/OneDrive via Microsoft Graph turducken. We lived with it because the finance team had enough of the metaphorical keys to the car to be deeply in the driver's seat of that project. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and deliver what the customer wants.
I know a few people who use Quantrix for financial modelling. It is an exceptionally nice piece of software, basically the successor of Lotus Improv, with Improv's more robust and auditable separation of data and formulas.
I used Apple Numbers for all my spreadsheeting so it depends what you mean by "serious financial work". The vast majority of folk could probably get by without using Excel I am guessing.
For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.
Sharepoint and office is the modern version of cancer. Nobody wants to manage onprem AD and mapped drives because cLoUd is the solution. Doesn't help that Microsoft stopped caring about onprem.
While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version.
You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
I just open them in Google Docs/Slides and then export later to the original format after edits. I’m sure it’s not feature complete but it’s good enough!
Excel has no competition whatsoever in the local software space. Google Sheets is somewhat useful for 80% of users but for people who must be on-prem/local it’s Excel or nothing.
Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?
In practice, it's like how having Adobe Reader used to be. You mostly don't need it, but occasionally you need it for interoperability with other people, such as lawyers.
Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.
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).
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.
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
A 5% increase is still a sizable when you consider the number of licenses that even an SMB may have. I don't deal with our MS licensing directly at $DAYJOB, but we've got something like 1300+ employees most (all?) of whom have M365 E5 licenses, that adds up to (roughly) an extra $4K/mo or $48K/yr when it comes time to renew our annual licensing.
Is it going to break the bank and send us into a financial death spiral? Absolutely not. But, you get enough companies deciding to jack up pricing at around the same time and it comes out to a significant increase in our lights-on budget - death by a million cuts hurts just as much as Broadcom raking us over the coals with VMWare license increases.
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.
It's more a ton of inertia than some sort of monopoly. A lot of new companies immediately start on an alternative these days. They don't see a reason to pay the higher price.
I agree that it's a lot of work to build something that can render and edit their complex format, but quite a few companies have managed now.
> At this point Microsoft office suite is practically a monopoly.
There are loads of competitors in the space. Google Docs, LibeOffice, OnlyOffice, WPS Office, and I'm sure there are many others in the space that are lesser known. All of these are compatible with Office formats.
I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files.
Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite well. Sure, Microsoft has a little bit of a leg up, but it's nothing like the monopoly they had on .doc.
Today, we expect programs to be able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. In the 90s, we truly didn't. Yes, there might be some advanced things that don't always work, but it's so different today.
I got a bad grade in a highschool English class because the teacher didn't like the doc file generated by StarOffice. My dad came round the school raising hell and got her to grade the paper on contents, saying if they wanted me to have office they could buy a copy of it. I got an A- after that
> Note: Indian Government recently adopted Zoho office suite to insulate themselves from Microsoft.
India's central government didn't adopt Zoho just to insulate against Microsoft. It was done when Trump imposed a 50% tariff on imports from India. It was targeted against US IT companies in general, though the most mentioned one was Google. Zoho is an Indian company.
I had switched to Zoho about 6 months before them and it has provided a rather decent experience so far. The biggest attractions for me though, are that it's very economical and it has transactions in local currency using local payment systems. They also have a good selection of apps.
Honestly, this was a wasted opportunity for GoI. Indian domestic IT market is an untapped gold mine that they didn't promote much until recently. But better late than never, I guess.
Another relevant point here is that India is one of the countries that voted against Microsoft OOXML document format in favor of ODF at ISO. There are several central and state level government agencies that adopted ODF officially.
To be honest I still see Microsoft able to squeeze even more dollars from customers bexause at this stage most are really locked in and has no other choices unless their entire Information System collapses.
So happy for customers choosing to go all-in with Microsoft. I sincerely think that Microsoft had to pour a lot of $$$$ to IT managers across US and EU to 'lobby' them to adopt O365. I say this because two of my last contracts in France had a great wall for anything published on the Internet because RGPD/Security/Data, but magically the same people that, you better insult them than ask for a Public IP, adopted O365.
Happy for all these companies, I hope they are squeezed even more.
Le me being layed off in April 2026 because the Cisco collaboration suite is phased out and the company goes all in with Teams. (I'm open to work in France)
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?
They need to raise prices to fund the new data centers for all the AI most Office customers didn't ask for and don't want.
It's annoying because for me the most useful parts of Office are OneNote and Publisher. OneNote being a neglected back-water app they obviously don't care about and Publisher actually being EOL in '26.
Weird view on how capitalism works. They raise prices because they (believe they) can and that's all. Prices are not tied to business cost. Even if all datacenters were subsidized by the government, this price rising would still happen.
Microsoft is basically a B2B now. Their customers are those who use Team and Exchange. Those customers are locked in and with no real alternative to migrate to.
I meet people who seem to believe that a platonic fair price exists for each transaction, that it is knowable and even obvious to the seller, and the ones who ask more are guilty of avarice.
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.
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.
I mean, they kind of are? Obviously they can't set it to a million dollars a month, but where's the ceiling? Five hundred? A thousand? Who knows? And maybe they make it play a 30 second video ad once a day?
They keep getting away with it, and nobody has any idea when the buck will finally stop.
Yes, that's how markets work. It seems like Microsoft understands it well or we'd be seeing mass exodus from Office products. No price increases for three years doesn't seem too bad, IMO.
> And maybe they make it play a 30 second video ad once a day?
Maybe. While we're at it, I'll also add a hypothetical: what if it encrypted all my files and made me pay a ransom?
On the contrary, I don't think end-user market forces are having any significant effect at all. There's currently boundless slack on that side as far as Microsoft is concerned. The only thing effecting the prices are the upcoming quarterly financials. "Line goes up" is the only economic law at play here. Their hopelessly trapped customers should consider themselves lucky a steeper deflection wasn't in order.
Have you stopped and thought about what you're saying or are you just assuming this is expensive because it's Microsoft and they're Bad?
Let's actually look at what you get for your money (I'll just go by current consumer pricing since it's easy to find/understand):
Microsoft 365 Family:
$130/year
6 people, 1TB storage per person
Each person gets 5 devices for all Office apps
Higher AI usage limits than free (only primary user, not shared)
Let's try to buy this from someone else:
Google: $99/year for 2TB, shared between 6 people, but your limit is 2TB total. No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI which bumps this all up to $20/month with no additional storage. I can't actually see how much additional storage costs to make this equivalent to 1TB/person without signing up.
Apple: $420/year to get 6TB of storage shared between 6 people. iWork apps are garbage, no AI included. iCloud+ does have some side features like private relay, custom domain email, etc.
Proton Family: 3TB, $288 a year
pCloud: 10TB family lifetime plan is $1500, equivalent to about 10 years of paying for Office 365.
All this to say, tl;dr, Microsoft is actually offering one of the better deals out there especially if you want to give a significant amount of storage to each family member at a low cost.
> No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI
Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)
Interesting, Google’s price comparison made it look like free tiers didn’t get that.
I did try to use annual pricing with annual discounts wherever I could, some services don’t really list it explicitly.
I will admit Microsoft’s pricing doesn’t really look as good if you’re not sharing the storage, and they get demerit for not providing a free tier for most of the apps at all.
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.
As an alternative, if you need Office, just search the web, there are plenty of places selling legitimate Office 2024 licenses for the cost of one month of one of these subscriptions.
[also massgrave will activate Office if you are really stuck...]
I'd be surprised if many normal people pay for this. It's for businesses, who aren't going to pay for sketchy keys. Also businesses generally want the web-based collaboration features. The days of emailing round files are long gone.
Yeah, sure, why not repeat the multi-decade old mistakes and decide to go from being dependent and locked in on one piece of proprietary software to being dependent and locked in on another piece of proprietary software.
2026 is definitely a great time for still not considering free software since lessons have not been learned yet.
You are trashing a competitor despite having the exact same fundamental flaws.
Please be actually better, please don't lock your users in. It's still time to make the right decision.
Yes, yes, everything should be free. Nobody should leave gainful employment to attempt to compete. Everyone should work using hamster and solar powered devices from their apple orchard communes. Understood.
> Please be actually better, we have too much trash proprietary software in this world.
> Nobody should leave gainful employment to attempt to compete.
That's not what I'm saying. You can thrive with an open source business model. I'm working for such a company.
Falsewoods software founders still believe about free and open source software in 2026
1. That's it's 100% made unpaid, outside business despite the numerous clues that it's not
(note to whom might read this thread: I edited my previous comment to tame it and make it a bit more constructive, piker cited something that doesn't appear anymore in my comment but that I indeed wrote)
That business model exists and appears here periodically complaining about how unfair Microsoft is. We don't care, we'll meet Microsoft where they are and just offer their customers a more specific solution.
Then make this specific solution open source, and make the laywers pay for support and roadmap decisions / features they require! Make them pay for integrations with Azure AD and struff like this! Make them pay for the binary! The possibilities are endless, it can work!
You can aim for better than "where MS is".
This could constitute a killer argument to make your solution appealing.
I would prefer unbundling this. I do not use Microsoft Office apps; I use Google Workspace apps which can read those files. I do heavily use OneDrive space though. I want to pay only for that. And cannot.
I would love to find a OneDrive replacement that works well both on Linux and Windows (and Android, iOS).
I have a family license and am more or less stuck with it, but for my business I will be moving things over to gsuite so I can be price gouged by them instead. It will cost more, but I’ll have Gemini, which is actually useful.
The last straw, aside from the price increases, was switching my office.com landing page to copilot. It feels like a new low, even for Microsoft.
You just lost $6/mo., Microsoft. I hope it was worth it.
Well, take the fact that they aren't seeing the adoption of their AI products as they'd wish and a switch from their products by several governments in the EU... they need to do something to keep revenue on target I guess.
Haven't opened Microsoft Office in I think 7 years. Haven't also used Apple's Office suite either - it is just Google Docs/presentations/sheets/drive for everything. I feel my life is better. They were massive installs and I prefer to have everything online all the time anyhow - just safer and more convenient.
If you have absolutely nothing in your documents that you wouldn’t mind giving the FBI to read without a warrant or probable cause, it is possible you are wasting your one and only life.
A good example would be anyone in the state-legal cannabis industry. This is still a federal crime (Schedule 1!), and giving cloud providers (and thus DHS without a warrant thanks to FAA702) concrete detailed evidence of same is, from a criminal liability standpoint, the same thing as mailing the FBI photos of your meth lab with your return address on it.
I am a Canadian. Pot is legal here at the federal level. My province (e.g. Canadian state) runs its own online pot store (hosted on Shopify BTW): https://ocs.ca. It includes various edibles too.
The height of me using Microsoft Office in a personal capacity was when I was in school and university. I've been fine living out of Google Docs since then. At work, my company is a Google Workspace customer and I have to say I've come to enjoy the comment/live editing functionality of Google Docs more than Word.
While businesses definitely don't need all those features, I guess most use it for compatibility sake - to work with existing files and to collaborate with others who use MS Office.
What's current state of open-source alternatives that can work with the MS file formats?
LibreOffice is working great and is compatible. I have never had any issues with formulas. I suppose if there are some very complex macros or formulas then it will break, but then you are probably using the wrong tool anyway.
It goes beyond the file formats. There is an entire ecosystem of industry specific extensions and plugins that are heavily used in law and accounting firms. These only work with MS office and they are critical to how many businesses operate.
Which kind of is on Microsoft for not fixing the situation and just carrying cruft every release. They could have a separate tool to fix/migrate to whatever modern format they are using nowadays (or to some "light" format that doesn't allow all the features 99% of users don't care about).
I don't use Office365 much, apart from maybe Outlook (which I have to, for some of my work). However, the other day I had to use PowerPoint in the browser for the first time (I use Linux, so no native app) and… it turns out it's completely and utterly broken? I mean, the document looked nothing like the presentation my coworker ended up giving (using the desktop application on Windows(?)). What I saw in the browser was that positions were off, font faces and sizes were inconsistent, etc. etc. It was wild. How do they even manage to sell that?
This is a nothingburger with fries and a drink. The largest increase is $3/month for heavy (as in big enterprise) licenses. This is not newsworthy and certainly not worthy of the HN frontpage.
Xbox spent $75 billion buying activision-blizzard, an acquisition which is very far away from making its money back, so price hikes were inevitable to cover the massive money hole that left.
Of course this price hike is inevitably dragging Xbox brand into the hole long term, but those in charge of the price hikes probably expect not to be around when that happens,.
I don't think the price hikes have been received terribly well - their Ultimate game pass service is now $30 a month (in the US), which seems to be pricing out a lot of their members. It now makes a lot more sense for many to just buy games outright.
Sorry, it wasn't clear if you were suggesting raising prices was an effective way to recoup the cost of the acquisition. When I wrote my comment, only the first half of yours was showing up.
The only reason people still need office -- other than a niche of advanced Excel users -- is because no one, despite the last several decades, has managed to make a 100% compatible DOCX editor (not LibreOffice, not Apple Pages, not Google Docs). I'm guessing it's because there are aspects of it that MSFT keeps secret?
The only reason I still use Word is because I don't want to have to deal with random layout incompatibility issues when sharing docs with colleagues.
In general, I find Apple Pages much more pleasant to work with and by far my favorite word processor (and I have used them all extensively on Win/Mac/nix).
You don't? The price increases are below euro inflation (although the numbers are listed in USD so I'm unsure if the price will be meaningfully different in Europe
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...
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