Microsoft Wants To Sell More Consumers a Software Subscription (bloomberg.com) 122
Microsoft unveiled a consumer subscription service with added Office programs and tools to protect children and older adults, part of an effort to shift more customers to ongoing payment plans that provide a smooth revenue stream. From a report: Microsoft 365 Personal and Family will begin rolling out April 21 at $6.99 a month for an individual and $9.99 a month for the family edition, which includes six users. That's the same price as the previous Office 365 consumer products, which have more than 37 million subscribers, said Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft vice president. Features will continue to be made available over the few months, he said. The company is adding services such as Microsoft Editor, an artificial-intelligence powered program for Word, Outlook email and the web browser that gives suggestions about how to make writing more concise, inclusive and grammatical.
There's also a presentation coach for the PowerPoint slideshow program that lets users practice in front of their laptops or phones -- the app will point out, for example, if presenters are turning away from their audience too often or resorting to the word "um." Excel will get a new service to track and analyze personal spending through a partnership with Plaid Technologies that lets customers import data from banking and checking accounts. Microsoft is trying to shift more corporate and consumer users to ongoing subscriptions delivered via the cloud and eliminate the need to persuade them to upgrade to new software every few years. Further reading: Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019.
There's also a presentation coach for the PowerPoint slideshow program that lets users practice in front of their laptops or phones -- the app will point out, for example, if presenters are turning away from their audience too often or resorting to the word "um." Excel will get a new service to track and analyze personal spending through a partnership with Plaid Technologies that lets customers import data from banking and checking accounts. Microsoft is trying to shift more corporate and consumer users to ongoing subscriptions delivered via the cloud and eliminate the need to persuade them to upgrade to new software every few years. Further reading: Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019.
With uncertain times ahead, why subscribe? (Score:5, Informative)
Nicotine patch (Score:2)
they need to sell it with a nicotine patch or some other addictive drug
Interoperability (Score:2)
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If I'm emailing my resume I want to know that when it gets opened the recruiter doesn't see a jumbled mess.
So, use plain text?
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He would also like a chance of getting hired.
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or perhaps PDF?
Why would you send a .doc in the first place?
Re:Interoperability (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm emailing my resume I want to know that when it gets opened the recruiter doesn't see a jumbled mess. Open Office is good, hell it's great, but it's not perfect.
How about send a PDF so that it's exactly what you want them to see?
Sending a resume as a Word or Open Office doc that can be edited by others is a bad idea.
However, I get resumes from applicants in that format all the time.
LibreOffice: Excellent PDF files (Score:2)
Re: LibreOffice: Excellent PDF files (Score:1)
What the hell is a PDF with an "active Internet link"?
You clearly have zero clue what PDF even is. Or a link for that matter. (Not the same thing as an anchor or an URL, by the way!)
If your PDF viewer runs scripts embedded in PDF (which itself is a script, by the way, bit purely self-contained!) or downloads files from links in the PDF, then stop using such a shitty PDF viewer!
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Oh, the irony! Zero clue, indeed.
You see, an "active internet link" is a hyperlink containing a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. It's usually blue and underlined, which is a visual cue for it's intended purpose. You hover your mouse pointer over it and the pointer will change to a little hand with a pointing finger, then you click the left mouse button and your operating system will start the default browser, and send the URL to it. The browser then navigates to that web page. Voila!
An inactive link would
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If you're worried about that, I would export to a format like PDF which should render the same no matter where it's viewed or printed. And LibreOffice includes built-in PDF export.
Besides, I would hardly count on two computers/devices running who knows what version of Word to render a document the same way.
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No one knows that will happen to the economy and jobs in the near future. Caution is wise. Unless 1-TB of online storage is exciting to you, just use what you already have paid for. I moved from Office 365 to LibreOffice two years ago. I like it. It works and it's free. I back up locally to portable hard drives. So, free OneDrive storage doesn't excite me. I hear a few "you're not the boss of me" comments out there. You're right!
I find the 1 TB useful as I backup my entire machine so if it dies while I. am traveling I can buy a new one if needed and be back up and running. I also use it to store a bunch of scanned photos. For me, that avoids the hassle of having a backup to the back when the backup HD fails. Plus, with 6 accounts. I can get 6TB of storage if needed. I buy the annual subscription when it is on sale and wind up paying about 2.5/moth. Last time I bough 3 years wort of subscriptions for. the price of 1 year; and yes th
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Problem is if you stop paying your storage goes read only and your software stops working.
When I need MS Office I have an old 2012 version I run in a VM. If I had rented it I couldn't do that the few times a year I need it. Aside from anything else if be forced to rent the 2020 version.
I'll stick with Libre Office.
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Subscriptions aren't for the customers, they're for the vendors.
Previously customers would umm-and-ah over the high price tag and maybe buy once and never again. Vendors like subscriptions because customers will buy into them because they're cheap when you don't look at the long tail then, because of apathy, never get around to cancelling their subscription. It will be up to their executors to cancel subscriptions when they're gone.
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Yeah, I did the math, over the years paid $7000 for a storage unit, containing less than $2000 worth of stuff.
Each month's rent was worth it, but I would have been financially better off dumping it all. Finally cleaned and sorted it out last summer.
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Anyone got a recommendation for a Visio replacement?
A Coreldraw replacement for mostly text formatting would be great too (Inkscape doesn't cut it.)
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Well, it's by no means comparable to Visio, but for basic diagrams and getting the point across, draw.io is surprisingly convenient. Wish they had an offline version.
If Inkscape isn't fancy enough for you, I doubt draw.io will fit your bill but it might be useful for others at least.
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Subscriptions (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft: Everyone should be using Office 365 and our other subscription and cloud-based services as they are the best value for the money.
Also Microsoft: Now that a lot of people are using our subscription and cloud-based services, we have to throttle a bunch of features...
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Meanwhile, I can use Pages, Numbers and Keynote on my Mac without having to pay Apple every month and they all work perfectly even if my internet is slowed down by a pandemic.
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Re: Subscriptions (Score:2)
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On the contrary. I manage Office 365 education subscriptions for a small school. In addition to the standard packages we all know and love {/s} there's considerably more available.
So, you get local versions of word, excel, powerpoint, access, outlook and onenote, but also online versions if that's what you prefer or if you happen to be using someone else's computer, you can login to your MS account and use them. There's the 1TB storage per subscription, which is great for backups.
Your email is run via excha
It's about scale? (Score:1)
I'm not the one to side with MS, ever, but that argument is just deliberately stupid.
Nobody can possibly forsee nor should anyone waste resource on preparing for an almost instant massive growth in usage!
If it had ramped up in an entirely normal fashion, they would not have had this problem.
It's like walking up to you with a cheerful smile and my hand in front of me as if to shake your hand... and then *punching you in the face* ... and going "Why don't you run around in a hockey mask all day? Moron.".
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Yes, but the point remains the same, if you don't own it then you don't control it and you're at the mercy of whoever does own and control it.
More rentier capitalism. (Score:1)
Because the peasants shouldn't own anything, they should let their betters manage it all for them. For a fee, of course. They deserve it, because they weren't smart enough to be capitalists!
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Still on Office 2010 (Score:4, Interesting)
And zero interest in changing. Newer versions offer nothing. I am on Windows 10, but not by choice.
There is an army of product managers at Microsoft with nothing to do, except to invent excuses to keep changing the product.
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There is an army of product managers at Microsoft with nothing to do, except to invent excuses to keep changing the product.
Which is why during this Coronavirus crisis Zoom became the preferred teleconferencing platform over Skype for work at home meetings.
Re: Still on Office 2010 (Score:1)
You mean Jitsi / Jitsi Meet.
Or, hell, whatever there was before that.
(I think, but am not sure if, Jitsi was the first to do PGP-style ZRTP-encrypted 128-people video conferencing without even blinking. And Jitsi Meet certainly is trivial.)
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Newer versions offer nothing.
Congratulations on not working for a Microsoft shop. You version of Office wouldn't even be able to open the files we work with, you know the ones that are stored on Sharepoint and get edited by multiple editors concurrently.
I think you mean "Newer versions offer nothing *to me*" which would be true, but as it stands your statement looks like an active 10 year old attempt to avoid reading changelogs.
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You version of Office wouldn't even be able to open the files we work with
More fool you.
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What part of the word "Consumers in "Microsoft wants to sell more CONSUMERS a Software Subscription" is giving you a problem.
He's not talking about a business.
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Re: Still on Office 2010 (Score:1)
Yeah, but LibreOffice would be able to open and save documents from old versions of MS Office. Yes, better than MS Office itself.
So there's that.
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I had Office 2007 and was okay with it up until I got Windows 10. I don't actually do that much with it anyway.
I still have the original disc and the license info, but for some reason I couldn't get it to install and register. I can't remember what the specific problem was, but instead of fighting it I downloaded LibreOffice and it just worked.
I think the issue with installing Office 2007 on Windows 10 was that Microsoft was so insistent that they get me to pay for a recurring license that they just decide
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Office 2007 here at home. Before that, I was using 2003, 2002/XP, 2000, 97, and 95.
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Also, I recalled where to find what in the old UI with great ease. It is still much faster to find what I want in the drop-down menus and toolbars.
While originally bought as a throwback, I might actually start using it for personal documents. There's no activation to worry me e
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Where did you buy yours? I got mine from other people since they didn't want them. Ha. I am buying lots of working stuff these days. :/
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Wow, the keys worked and not blacklisted. Lucky you. I was worried about my keys since they were already used.
That is nice (Score:4, Interesting)
One more step until Windows 365 (Score:2)
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If that happens then hello Linux!
Re: One more step until Windows 365 (Score:1)
Well, I switched when the Content Mafia tool Windows Vista came out. When their original goal was, to have the OS not trust you on your own PC, and regularly ask Content Mafia servers what you are allowed to do on or build into your PC.
Never looked back. It's like having used a professional Makita or Fein tool. You can't go back to a shitty home tool gamer tool from the Homeless Deathspot now!
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I had written an anti-flashing screen filter for epileptic users for XP, but Vista-10 DRM path doesn't allow it (I tried to re-make it when the last season of Stranger Things came out) It would have to be part of a signed driver I believe. Maybe someone can convince nvidia or AMD to do it.
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It's the new monopolism! (Score:1)
What do you do, when you can't do monopolismy but want to?
*Lock-in to a service provider!*
Same thing, but officially still legal because only if you fell for it.
Same thing that Uber and WeWork are doing.
And the same thing as that de-facto slavery in South-American minesy where renting the bucket costs more than they pay you for digging up a bucket's worth of minerals.
I think it should be a crime. Because it is.
No subscription software (Score:2)
Microsoft is becoming more and more abusive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Engadget writer Richard Lawler revealed that users were now trying to hack the Windows 10 registry to disconnect their local file searches from Microsoft servers (more below) "and I can't say I blame them after this episode. Microsoft owes users a better explanation than this and should make sure it's impossible for offline features to get taken out when the cloud is having an issue."
"That’s Microsoft’s underlying tactics all along: sneak questionable mechanics into Windows with updates, backtrack only if someone noticed them, reported them and if that creates a big enough public outcry", commented one user.
Windows 10 registry hack appears to be the only 100% fix for this issue and it also disconnects Bing and Cortana online services from Windows 10 search.
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MS Office? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do companies make bad decisions about IT? (Score:4, Informative)
We need a world-class effort to make the LibreOffice user interface somewhat easier, however, in my opinion.
Re: Do companies make bad decisions about IT? (Score:1)
But please not in the direction that MS Office went!
No ribbons. But sidebars! Like good professional software, e.g. from Adobe or Autodesk. Or at least like Lotus SmartSuite, but more keyboard-driven.
Or, ideally, like Autodesk Maya, where the entire UI is made from scripts that you can modify trivially. And everything you do visually, is at the same time a script, that you can mark and draf onto the shelf to create a new button.
Hell, VBA is SO close ... but still completely misses that.
Just make the sidebar
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And better compatibility please. I still get some bad formattings, unable to open password protected Office documents, etc.
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After many (dozens, probably) requests, LO now has a "Ribbon" interface that you can switch to.
I'm told.
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Just No (Score:2)
Rent seeking, unwanted changes to UI and workflow - please just stop.
Clippy! (Score:2)
The company is adding services such as Microsoft Editor, an artificial-intelligence powered program for Word, Outlook email and the web browser that gives suggestions about how to make writing more concise, inclusive and grammatical.
Hey! It looks like you are trying to write a plan for how to rip people off. Would you like help with that?
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The Hemingway editor is great. I used it when I was ghostwriting a blog for an attorney, taking arguments from his writings for clients and de-personalizing them so his explanation of legal things was suitable for publication.
MS building a work-alike into Word would help make better, more readable documents.
Just $9.99?! I will take two! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft, do you want piracy? Because this is how you get piracy.
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This is FIVE fold price increase.
Not really. You're using a version of Office that is over 4 versions old to say nothing of the service packs. If you were to be using Office with all the features intact you'd have paid for every upgrade as well as be paying a subscription fee for cloud storage anyway. Additionally your original license covers 1 license on 1 PC, this subscription allows 1 user on 5 devices, PC or otherwise.
So let's do some math. $249.99 * 5 licenses * 4 upgrades = $5000. We'll ignore the cloud subscription for now since you
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offering someone something for a small subscription fee rather than a large one off fee actually pushes people *away* from privacy
I’m sure that’s a typo, but that statement is still valid.
Re:Just $9.99?! I will take two! (Score:4, Insightful)
You're using a version of Office that is over 4 versions old.
It still works and fully compatible with the latest Office version I have at work. I would still be using Office 97 if Microsoft didn't intentionally break .doc formatting.
If you were to be using Office with all the features
Does anyone? "All the features" is all bloat and edge cases. Essential office functionality hasn't changed since late 90s.
intact you'd have paid for every upgrade as well as be paying a subscription fee for cloud storage anyway.
This is bridge too far. Not even enterprise does this. I might have updated Office one extra time if I had to always work from my home computer.
It miggt be four versions old in numbers. (Score:1)
But tell me a single new thing that was added, that actually was worth any money... or was ever needed by you ... or had a point at all.
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From a local excel file I can run an embedded query against an external sharepoint site to retrieve job statistics keyed by other staff. Those data are then processed for various management purposes.
Paying developers to provide the same setup would have cost a lot more than the subscriptions. I didn't have to write a single line of code, just a relatively simple SQL-like query.
I can continue doing my job while in lockdown. So it's worth the money, and it has a purpose for the running of the business.
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From a local excel file I can run an embedded query against an external sharepoint site to retrieve job statistics keyed by other staff.
This is enterprise functionality. How many " Personal and Family" consumers would use something like that?
More so, this functionality makes your excels fragile and non-portable OR you are exposing your data to the entire world. Excel is not a replacement for a database application and/or matlab even if it can do some of it.
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This is FIVE fold price increase.
Not really. You're using a version of Office that is over 4 versions old to say nothing of the service packs. If you were to be using Office with all the features intact you'd have paid for every upgrade as well as be paying a subscription fee for cloud storage anyway.
A 4 version-old Office should be more than sufficient for home use. If you really need all the bells and whistles of modern Office you are most likely using it for work and it should be provided to you/written off as a business expense (depending on if you are employed/self-employed)
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They would rather have piracy than everybody saying no thanks and switching to FOSS alternatives.
Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office (Score:4, Insightful)
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That is why I switched to LibreOffice years ago and never looked back.
Yeah, there are plenty of non-subscription alternatives which will address the needs of most home users - heck, probably even a large percentage of business users.
I have a license for MS Office 2016 for Mac. It's no longer installed on our home computers, though - Apple's Pages and Numbers applications work fine. I've used LibreOffice before, and as you say - it works great. If all you need is a word processor, AbiWord is another slick alternative (although it looks like they no longer offer a Windows build
Thanks but no thanks (Score:2)
No one around me will ever pay for that (friends, family, ...) for personal use. My mom/dad will never pay 9.99$ US/month (so around 14$ CAD/month) for that.
No thanks (Score:2)
My Office 2013 works just fine, and if that dies there is always Google Docs or Libre Office. They're not going to get my money on a monthly basis.
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What a deal! (Score:2)
The Microsoft Home Use Program used to cost about $10 for a copy of Microsoft Office for home use. Now it's $10/month.
So assuming I want to stick with Office my choices are
Keep using the one I have
or
Pay $10 month.
How can I pass up this awesome deal?
Microsoft forces subscriptions on consumers (Score:2)
Por qué no los dos? (Score:2)
I can rent a car, or I can buy one. Car dealers offer buy or lease options. I can just take a taxi or a ride-share. There are lots of ways to get what a car provides, a whole spectrum from "buy it and maintain it for the rest of your life" to "hop in for 15 minutes to go someplace".
Why don't they offer the traditional "buy it and patch it only if it breaks" model along side the SaaS?
Because it is not a car. (Score:1)
It is not a physical good at all.
You cannot "rent" information.
That is like saying you "rent" a secret from somebody. What, do you think you will magically forget the secret when it's over?
And unless you paid programmers to write it, you also never "bought" any software.
You are paying for a *license*.
Which works exactly the same as a racketeering deal with the Mafia.
You don't get beaten up, as long as you pay. Except they bought a law that gives them an exemption on the otherwise illegal practices of monopo
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We get it. You refuse to accept the notions of intellectual property and/or copyright law. A lot of us are just fine with that.
Really, it was a rhetorical question anyway. As others have pointed out, the subscription is a much less fair deal than fee-for-product. I don't know how much my XP license cost because it was rolled in to the cost of the laptop, but I ran XP for 10 years! I've run 8.1 for four years now, and under the subscription scheme I would have paid more than the initial cost of the lice
Rent everything, own nothing! (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't fall for this shit. Stop using Microsoft!
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What exactly would we be paying for? (Score:1)
What work could you possibly offer to take our money for, on software that was *done*, two decades ago?
Yet more pointless bloat that only exists to justify us paying more money?
Yeah, that's circular reasoning.
Or to fix bugs?
Cause we alredy paid for non-broken software, you know? This was already part of the deal.
You earned your money! And way more than that too! It's done! Open-source it! Find a new project that actually warrants us paying money for actual valuable work! (And if you aren't criminals, open-s
Too exspenive. (Score:2)
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From the "NO SHIT" Department (Score:2)
"Microsoft Wants To Sell More Consumers a Software Subscription"
No shit, really? Wow, that IS a shock. Who could have guessed that they want to force you to pay and pay and pay and pay and pay and pay and pay and pay and pay and pay?
You don't own that. (Score:2)
The user agreement that Microsoft -- and most other software companies -- makes you sign to enable their software makes it pretty clear that you don't own the software, even though you just paid them a wad of money for it. You have a permit to use it for as long as Microsoft thinks you should be allowed to do so, and you cannot sell it or share it with anyone. Many people ignore this, even though MS puts a lot of obstacles in the way of doing it. Now, the wizards of Washington have decided that they want
Not happening (Score:2)
Subscriptions are all the rage... (Score:2)
And those who rage that way fail to understand thing like LIbreoffice exist.
Intuit just did this to me too.
I now have two years to find a replacement for their piracy. Homebank looks promising.
Activestate did this with Komodo IDE and all their language products (PERL,Python, Ruby etc). I rolled back to the last non-subscription version and will NEVER pay them anything again nor will I recommend any of their products to anyone.
They lose.
+700% increase (Score:2)
in the meantime Azure is coping with a +700% workload increase, this is the platform Office365 runs on.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Obvious move is obvious (Score:2)
This was obvious from the moment Microsoft killed the installed-Office product for Microsoft HUP customers. Basically, corporations with Enterprise licenses could give their employees Office at a pretty decent discount through their "Home Use Program". I used it for years to install Office on my primary computer through a couple of employers. Last year, they killed the installed-Office program through HUP and now only offer subscriptions.
For my part, I'm not a heavy Office user anyway. Most of my stuff that
Re: Florida church holds packed pandemic services (Score:1, Offtopic)
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I don't think that sounds as terrible as you were intending it AC.
Sunshine, fresh air, all the king crab you can eat.
Pack me a volley ball and off I go.
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I am in the UK, and looking at Spain and Italy, if you guys in the US can't see the writing on the wall you deserve everything you are going to get over the next few weeks. Wake up, stay at home, keep isolated from all other human beings and pray to whatever you worship that you don't need a hospital because I can tell you no matter how brilliant you think you are in the US this fucking thing is coming for you!
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If you use it every day, it's a reasonable rate.
But I only need to use word/excel for personal use a handful of times a year.