It depends on what they've purchased. Microsoft's basic licenses haven't gone up by that much in five years. The top tier E5 license was $57 per month in 2020, and today it's $54.75 (albeit without Teams, which costs $8 per month with a phone number attached). European prices are probably a bit different, but the price changes in percentages won't be notably different. Even add-ons like Entra Suite or Intune Suite won't add 72%. It's more likely that they have Azure VMs or other services, and that's where the majority of the cost increase came from. If they're not planning on bringing that on-prem, they'll see some savings, but it may not be all that much.

Yep. At list price, an M365 E5 license is $657 per year in the US. For every thousand dollars of lost productivity per person due to the change, they could get 1.5 years of Microsoft licenses at one of the highest tiers.

> Since it is Linux it could be android compatible and capable of running anything an android phone can run

"Could be" is pretty far from "will be," and even further from "is."

> android is 99.9% Linux

Android is based on Linux, and there's a lot of overlap, but it's not as close as you claim. If it were, it would be a lot easier to run Android apps on Linux. As it is, you have to jump through some hoops. Even using tools like Waydroid, you're having someone else jump through those hoops for you, and you're not getting native performance. Taking "Linux" to mean a distribution like Debian, the two environments differ substantially. Even the kernels have diverged in notable ways, though Google still uses the Linux kernel as the upstream source.

Ubuntu tried to make a mobile OS, but eventually dropped it. Pine64 has one, but it's more a hobbyist platform. Purism has PureOS, derived from Debian, but it's market is negligible. It's not easy.

It's not the first time we've seen this idea. The others all failed for a simple reason: no compatibility with the Google or Apple app stores. Without that, it just won't catch on.

> The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can.

Maybe it was that way one time, but most of the major projects that we rely on are written more by professional developers with decent to large paychecks that depend on them writing good software. LibreOffice is not immune from this, with Collabora providing a lot of the development output because their business depends on moving LibreOffice forward.

I think Munich has switched back and forth a few times. They kept finding that FOSS was ultimately more expensive because of training and compatibility issues.

> Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.

Exchange admins are a dying breed because on-prem Exchange is vanishing in favor of M365. Microsoft is slowly making IMAP and POP3 less viable, removing basic authentication a couple of years ago. If your client can't do OAuth 2.0, it can't access M365 over IMAP. It will not be surprising at all to see IMAP and POP3 deprecated entirely in the next few years, requiring all connections to go via API over HTTPS.

> Moving off of MS Word doesn't hurt their budget if you still need a license to MS 365 to get your email.

You can get less expensive licenses that give access to email. The F-series licenses give only web versions of Office access, though Outlook (which comes with Windows now) works just fine.

The reason that we have M365 E5 licenses, though, isn't so much the Office suite. It's everything else that comes with it: OneDrive, SharePoint (which we use almost entirely for file storage, not internal websites), PowerBI, and the security and compliance features. On top of that, we don't have to manage any of the patching or uptime of the services. They (mostly) just work. That Office comes with it is almost a bonus. For a small company, it's a godsend. For a medium-sized company like ours, that's a significant savings, probably several million dollars that would have gone to IT above and beyond what we already spend with Microsoft. Larger enterprises may have a different view, which is why so many are moving back on-prem for some services.

I would love to see some alternatives that could be run on-prem. LibreOffice Online development was stopped five years ago. Collabora Online offers its development edition that can be run locally, but support is limited. Realistically, almost any company is going to use Microsoft, Google, or (distant third?) AWS WorkDocs, and it will be that way unless and until open-source can come up with something that is relatively easy to set up and covers at least what M365 Business Premium or Google Workspaces provides.

That's what I assumed as well. Buy Now Pay Later loans like this have a long history of being predatory. So I took a look at what it would cost to accept Klarna (as an example) as a merchant. The reality is that they have transaction fees that are very similar to credit cards. In other words, these companies do not need to rely on missed payments to make a profit.

These companies are apparently setting themselves up to replace traditional credit card payment systems, which suits me right down to the ground.

The difference is that it is much easier to get a Klarna account, and it isn't (yet) as widely available.

I felt the same way at first. Traditional BNPL schemes were very predatory. However, Klarna (and others) appear to be playing approximately the same game as the traditional credit card processors. They charge transaction fees that are roughly the same as credit card processors, and like credit cards their customers don't pay extra if they pay their bill on time. Klarna, in particular actually appears to give customers interest free time.

The difference, for consumers, is primarily that a Klarna account is much easier to get, and it isn't universally accepted. From a merchant perspective, depending on your payment provider, you might already be able to accept Klarna, and it appears that it mostly works like a credit card. It's even possible that charge backs are less of an issue, although it does appear that transaction fees are not given back in the case of a refund.

Personally, I am all for competition when it comes to payment networks. Visa and Mastercard are both devils. More competition for them is good for all of us.

It wasn't lawfare against Trump. The man is guilty of multiple felonies that would have landed anyone else in prison for decades.

Trump, on the other hand, has engaged in lawfare, going after people purely because they didn't like him or because they did something that annoyed him, like providing legal counsel to someone he doesn't like. So far, he is mostly losing. How long that matters is still up in the air.

Monica Cellio was reportedly fired when she asked if it was OK if she used gender-neutral language that does not use pronouns at all, since that can help avoid misgendering situations. She also said that use of preferred pronouns was the right thing to do, and that knowingly misgendering someone is wrong. She said that she was told by other moderators that avoiding third-person singular pronouns was itself misgendering. It's not clear from what she wrote if she was fired for asking the question, or fired preemptively for potentially not following in the future a policy that was still under development, and she may not have known at the time. From what I've read, I'm not sure if that was ever entirely established.

Stack Overflow later posted a very legalese response "regretting" how it all turned out and any damage to Monica's reputation, while also offering to allow her to apply for reinstatement. Monica stated in the same thread that she could not say anything for legal reasons, suggesting that there was a settlement. She did not attempt to get reinstated, and left SO entirely a few months later.

In America we have essentially legislated against small vehicles. Our CAFE standards were supposedly designed to push us towards more fuel efficient vehicles, but the reality is that the easiest way to pass CAFE standards is to simply make the vehicle larger. So the United States ends up with larger vehicles, and the smaller vehicles that we do get tend to be more expensive than we should be. We have essentially legislated away the category of a ultra basic small car. That happens to be a pretty popular segment in most of the world. The small cars we can buy are nearly as expensive as their larger brethren and so they make a lot less sense.

EVs are an even better example of how U.S. legislation skews things towards larger ICE vehicles. The most popular EVs in most of the world are the most basic EVs. I personally would love to buy a basic EV to replace my current commuter car. I have a house and a place to plug in an EV. My commute is short and even the most basic EVs would be fine. However, the only vehicles available in the market are essentially luxury vehicles. I can buy a whole lot of gasoline for $30K, which is the least expensive new EV available here, but if I could get my hands on a cheap Chinese EV for $12K I absolutely would do that. For the price of the least expensive EV you can basically buy a Toyota RAV4 that is a much more capable vehicle.

Yes, verifying the citations is trivially easy, which is how these people get caught. You will notice that the lawyers in question say that it was an honest citation mistake and not "fabrication of authority" which is a legal term for a crime that carries jail time and fines. The problem with that defense is that the article that they cited doesn't actually exist. They say it has an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors, but I suspect that is legal speak for, "AI made up the article."

Now, if an article exists that happens to say approximately the same thing, and it just has a different title and authors then it is possible that the lawyers in question might be able to pretend that they really did just goof up the title and authors. If not, then what they did actually fits the definition of fabrication of authority. At which point I think that they should throw the book the fools.

The reality is that our current legal system relies heavily on lawyers not pulling these kinds of stunts. The system is adversarial, for sure, but it is generally assumed that the opposing counsel isn't making things up whole cloth. That's why fabrication of authority carries such high penalties. No one has time to check every citation. The assumption is that the person writing the brief is citing correctly and not misrepresenting what is actually said. The fact that these particular lawyers took it a step further and included a citation that doesn't even exist is absolutely ridiculous.

Yes. And they probably need to use Google Messages and not whatever Samsung (or whatever) sets by default. The Apple user also has to have iOS 18 and a carrier that supports RCS for iPhones, this is definitely not all of them, although the big three now support RCS on iPhone.

I suspect that there were lots of cases, in a company the size of Microsoft, where someone didn't get along with their boss, or had problems with a team that they were on, but that still had friends and allies in other parts of the organization. So they might get let go from one part of the organization, but when another part of the organization had an opening they then got rehired.

Like most rules of this type I would bet that the new policy has an interesting story. I would bet that one particularly toxic employee got rehired enough times that management finally created a policy against it. The whole point of the new policy is that people fired in this manner can no longer work for Microsoft for two years, even if some other part of the organization wants them.