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Investors love SaaS because customers love SaaS. Every day they pay for o365 instead of figuring out libreoffice. The alternatives exist, but they are less full

Investors love SaaS because customers love SaaS. Every day they pay for o365 instead of figuring out libreoffice. The alternatives exist, but they are less fully featured, less well integrated, and harder to learn. Why? Because all those extra niceties cost money that Microsoft can pay programmers to work on instead of hacking on arduinos or whatever else they'd do in their free time. SaaS is just patreon that works. You pay the organization that builds it money every month, and you get a constant stream of updates and support.

rsj_hn 4y ago
The office pricing is pretty attractive, especially for a family plan. $120 a year, or $10 a month, for up to 6 people. They throw in 1 Terrabyte of cloud storage/person and email, and you can get the full office app download (what I use) as well as the browser-based versions that are cloud hosted. You can save documents locally or on the cloud, it's up to you. I got it and it works for our family, where we have both mac and PC members. One of us is working on some chapters for a technical book that is being done on windows, whereas three of us use a mac, and it was the desire to have a common office suite and share documents especially with non-technical family members that made it work out. One of my requirements was decent foreign language support and also right to left text, and I'm a heavy user of excel as well. Depending on how much you value your time, it only takes a few hours of frustration working with the opensource alternatives before it makes sense to sign up. At the same time, I'm glad that free office alternatives exist to put competitive pressure on Microsoft and to give options for Linux users or those for whom open source is important. Prior to getting the 365 subscription, I used the openoffice flavors for many years at home and the MS office when I needed to write documents at work. Now at work I use gsuite/wikis and never touch office, but have come to really appreciate it for private use. Something about never using it at work totally changed how I look at MS Office -- like a pall was removed and I realized this is pretty good software.
projektfu 4y ago
Less fully featured is also defined by the features in the flagship product, for which alternatives are always playing catch-up. Many of Excel's features are mis-features but not implementing them leads to incompatibility.
CRConrad 4y ago
> Investors love SaaS because customers love SaaS. I think you misread the GP. As I read it, it didn't say that "investors love SaaS". Investors don't love SaaS; they don't really give a shit about software architectures. Investors love rent seeking. SaaS just happens to be the current means to that end.

rsj_hn 4y ago

The office pricing is pretty attractive, especially for a family plan. $120 a year, or $10 a month, for up to 6 people. They throw in 1 Terrabyte of cloud storage/person and email, and you can get the full office app download (what I use) as well as the browser-based versions that are cloud hosted. You can save documents locally or on the cloud, it's up to you. I got it and it works for our family, where we have both mac and PC members. One of us is working on some chapters for a technical book that is being done on windows, whereas three of us use a mac, and it was the desire to have a common office suite and share documents especially with non-technical family members that made it work out. One of my requirements was decent foreign language support and also right to left text, and I'm a heavy user of excel as well. Depending on how much you value your time, it only takes a few hours of frustration working with the opensource alternatives before it makes sense to sign up. At the same time, I'm glad that free office alternatives exist to put competitive pressure on Microsoft and to give options for Linux users or those for whom open source is important. Prior to getting the 365 subscription, I used the openoffice flavors for many years at home and the MS office when I needed to write documents at work. Now at work I use gsuite/wikis and never touch office, but have come to really appreciate it for private use. Something about never using it at work totally changed how I look at MS Office -- like a pall was removed and I realized this is pretty good software.

projektfu 4y ago

Less fully featured is also defined by the features in the flagship product, for which alternatives are always playing catch-up. Many of Excel's features are mis-features but not implementing them leads to incompatibility.

CRConrad 4y ago

> Investors love SaaS because customers love SaaS. I think you misread the GP. As I read it, it didn't say that "investors love SaaS". Investors don't love SaaS; they don't really give a shit about software architectures. Investors love rent seeking. SaaS just happens to be the current means to that end.