11 ms·

I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities,

I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era. I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day. So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? That vendor lock-in is obviously part of the con (see for instance the complete and very deliberate lack of portability of documents created in OneNote, if you don't have the Professional/Enterprise version). And there are innumerable better services out there, many of which are even free.

aetherspawn 2y ago
We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore. Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business. Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible. Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible. Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version. This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all? I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees. I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.
- formerphotoj 2y ago
  This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!
  - croemer 2y ago
    Digitalisierungsschattenpreise
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      To save some folks a few clicks, "Digitization Shadow Prices".
      - croemer 2y ago
        This isn't a real word (yet) of course (at least no Google hits). Just made it up on the spot.
        valenterry 2y ago
        I'm German and I wasn't sure if you made it up or if it existed before. :)
    - cookiengineer 2y ago
      As a German, I approve this wording. Basically, it's a Digitalisierungsschattenwucherbepreisungsskandal
      - formerphotoj 2y ago
        I'm having fun sounding this one out for myself! I like how it audibly bounces along via -ung -en -er -ei(eye) -ung and -al. Makes me wanna say, "Now That's Fahrvergnügen!" Or rather, Sprechenvergnügen?
  - 2y ago
Aurornis 2y ago
You can still buy the latest Office for personal use with a one-time purchase.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Office 365 is very much targeted at personal users, as well. I mean, it literally has a "personal" plan (and also a "family" plan).
- joe5150 2y ago
  Do you mean "more appropriate for" businesses? Because 365 is definitely targeted at individuals, nation states, and everything in between. Microsoft's home page is advertising Microsoft 365 "For 1 person" literally as I type this!
rawbot 2y ago
> So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? OneDrive Family plan is still the cheapest and largest cloud storage (6TB of cloud storage for $99/year).
- anytime5704 2y ago
  Yeah, but then you have to use onedrive…
  - kyriakos 2y ago
    I see a lot of people complaining about this, what exactly is wrong with onedrive as opposed to Google drive or Dropbox? Haven't used Dropbox in many years. They all just sync files which is what I need them for.
    - anytime5704 2y ago
      I’m just one person. So take my opinion for what it is: just my opinion. I started using Dropbox in high school and it has always “just worked”. I use the native app on Windows, iOS, and OSX. It’s essentially a virtual drive on all my devices and it backs up all my phone’s pictures and videos automatically. I can probably count on one hand the number of times Dropbox has annoyed me in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s overpriced, but at least it’s reliable. That’s worth a lot to me. I experimented with Google drive as an alternative in college. It worked pretty well on android devices, but there was just enough friction on other OS’s that I abandoned it as a general file system. My g drive is basically just a graveyard of Google docs that I will never care to organize and random gmail attachments that ended up there for whatever reason. Onedrive is by far the last choice I would make. My only experiences with it are (1) when Microsoft tries to force it on me/upsell me when I’m using office on my personal desktop or (2) when an employer uses it as their approved file sharing system. In my experience, it is consistently the least reliable of the three solutions. While Dropbox “just works”, I fully expect Onedrive to “just make me restart my computer, sign out and back in again, give up and just share the thing through slack.” Again, just my experience.
int_19h 2y ago
You can still buy Office 2024 as a proper app without any of that cloud stuff if you want to.
- 725686 2y ago
  Could you please point me where to buy it?
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    Stacksocial has been doing Office promos for years. They're inexpensive, forever licenses but I'd guess they aren't transferable. I've bought a dozen or two. https://www.stacksocial.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=office https://www.stacksocial.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=offi... Techspot has deals on Office 2024. https://www.techspot.com/news/96637-microsoft-office-lifetime-license.html https://www.techspot.com/news/96637-microsoft-office-lifetim...
    - mh- 2y ago
      Wasn't aware of these sort of deals.. would love something like this for the Adobe suite.
      - bubblethink 2y ago
        The ultra cheap ones are grey market. Someone reselling something they are technically not supposed to.
        WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
        I'm familiar with greymaket sellers but these aren't them. Stacksocial brokers software deals as fundraisers for major websites. They've been around a long time.
    - switch007 2y ago
      Stacksocial looks like one of those many dodgy sites selling licenses of questionable origin How can you be sure they are bona fide Microsoft licenses?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
danpalmer 2y ago
I've long felt that consumer acceptance of this pricing correlates with whether the subscription has a cost-of-good-sold component. Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
- gruez 2y ago
  >and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service. You underestimate the technical sophistication of the average user. Even with perfect docs, there's going to be 1% (or whatever) of customers that call into technical support asking questions. That's essentially COGS.
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support. In the same way, marketing costs vary wildly per sale and are very hard to attribute, which is why marketing is usually not a part of the COGS.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support. By that logic, do cloud companies need to factor storage costs into COGS? Most people don't store exactly 1TB when they get the 1TB plan, and many don't use anywhere near that amount. Does that mean dropbox can pretend their offering has 100% margins? Sounds unlikely. The principle of accounting is that the numbers should reflect the actual business. Customer support costs don't have to be allocated to sales with 100% accuracy, but they can't pretend it doesn't impact unit economics either.
duxup 2y ago
Office suites are particularly annoying as for a home user ... most people don't use much at all. If it wasn't for the office sort of standard, you can get away with just not using an office suite, lots of good options out there. Free / surprisingly capable apps.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  I'm weird and use TeX for my resume because I'm an annoying nerd, but I literally have not encountered an Office document in over a decade. I see Google workspace at work for my last couple jobs, and there's libreoffice if I occasionally want a spreadsheet at home. Everything I encounter from banks and governments is web or pdf these days.
  - duxup 2y ago
    For personal stuff I agree, I haven't found an office suite necessary.
Workaccount2 2y ago
Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add". Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.
- gruez 2y ago
  That sort of exists. You heard of home service plans? You pay a fixed fee to some provider, and they the cost to send a plumber/hvac guy/whatever if something breaks. For software, instead of getting your toilet unclogged, you get small features and bug fixes.
  - cj 2y ago
    Exactly this. All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together. So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment. They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix. Private equity is an underrated danger to society.
    - onemoresoop 2y ago
      Any way we could fight this? It seems things are getting worse and worse and I don’t see any solution
      - ndriscoll 2y ago
        DIY it. Our dryer stopped heating, so I popped the screws off and it turns out the heating coil had burned out. Like $20 on Amazon. Our kitchen sink's faucet cracked and started leaking down the hose into the cabinet below so I bought a new one at Lowe's for like $20. Our oven stopped heating and the clock area where the control circuit is located kept clicking so I gave it a good smack like the primate I am. Free.
gruez 2y ago
>I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day. You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette. https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide filter for "office"
- netsharc 2y ago
  Huh, there must be(tm) a scanner for malware for these files. I know they're XML, although I wonder how much of it end up being base64-encoded binary blobs...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- userbinator 2y ago
  untrusted docx/xlsx file Contrary to what the propaganda wants you to think, I suspect the majority of people who have the brain to oppose are not opening every file that's sent to them by strangers.
  - gruez 2y ago
    The "majority" of people probably aren't clicking on untrusted links either, but we still advise people to keep their browsers up to date. Many people also need to open .docx files from strangers because it's part of their profession/business. Small business owners need to read RFPs and pay invoices, and jobseekers might need to open a questionnaire from a potential employer, all of which could be in .docx. The sender doesn't even have to be malicious. It's possible for one person, who's used to opening untrusted documents on a regular basis (eg. recruiter), to get infected, and for the malware to infect other documents that person sends to others (eg. finance).
scarface_74 2y ago
Dropbox’s 2TB plan is $120. Office 365 is $129 with 1TB each for 6 users.
- what-the-grump 2y ago
  And you get anti-virus and credit monitoring with that...
TZubiri 2y ago
So we should pay google engineers for making a saas app. But we should fire microsoft engineers for making a cost efficient binary. Not saying that's wrong, just reframing. Also this debate is so 2000s, we've been over this, things need updates, for security at least. Who's gonna pay for it.
Hilift 2y ago
Windows Enterprise edition has been subscription-only licensing for several years. The lowest edition cost is about twice that of Professional over a five year period.
zugi 2y ago
> I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era. True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost. Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable. Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.
tomjen3 2y ago
A few gigs? It is (or was) cheaper to signup for 365 than by the same storage in dropbox. It is cheaper to get that package than get Zoom.
- darthwalsh 2y ago
  Right, I've never heard 1,000 called "a few!"
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era. I have Office 2010 on an old computer." Statement #1 will trigger a stream of HN replies that ignore statement #2 and attempt to justify the price increase from $0 in 2010 to whatever Microsoft is charging today. It is anyone's guess why this happens. The old computer is the author's personal computer, not one owned by an employer with a "Professional/Enterprise" license. This is clear from the final sentence of the comment. The author is not the only recreational user who still has an old computer with Office 2010 (I have some other past versions of Office as well) and is aware of the con.
centur 2y ago
You still can buy Office standalone licenses with Classic Office (aka desktop apps). I got myself 2019 and 2021 versions (different OSes) and prefer them. However I've a personal MS365 subscription for business, I like permanent licenses for products more. On a related note - I bought some permanent licenses for devtools, where they advertised subscription model only :) Directly reached developers and asked if it's possible or not. Works well for both sides - I probably paid for the tool more than their average subscription lifetime, but I've got few tools that I need to use occasionally but over a longer period of time - e.g. one tool I used maybe 10-15 times, but over a 7 years. That does not work with bigger companies though :(

aetherspawn 2y ago

We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore. Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business. Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible. Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible. Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version. This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all? I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees. I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.

formerphotoj 2y ago
This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!
- croemer 2y ago
  Digitalisierungsschattenpreise
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    To save some folks a few clicks, "Digitization Shadow Prices".
    - croemer 2y ago
      This isn't a real word (yet) of course (at least no Google hits). Just made it up on the spot.
      - valenterry 2y ago
        I'm German and I wasn't sure if you made it up or if it existed before. :)
  - cookiengineer 2y ago
    As a German, I approve this wording. Basically, it's a Digitalisierungsschattenwucherbepreisungsskandal
    - formerphotoj 2y ago
      I'm having fun sounding this one out for myself! I like how it audibly bounces along via -ung -en -er -ei(eye) -ung and -al. Makes me wanna say, "Now That's Fahrvergnügen!" Or rather, Sprechenvergnügen?
- 2y ago

Aurornis 2y ago

You can still buy the latest Office for personal use with a one-time purchase.

int_19h 2y ago
Office 365 is very much targeted at personal users, as well. I mean, it literally has a "personal" plan (and also a "family" plan).
joe5150 2y ago
Do you mean "more appropriate for" businesses? Because 365 is definitely targeted at individuals, nation states, and everything in between. Microsoft's home page is advertising Microsoft 365 "For 1 person" literally as I type this!

rawbot 2y ago

> So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? OneDrive Family plan is still the cheapest and largest cloud storage (6TB of cloud storage for $99/year).

anytime5704 2y ago
Yeah, but then you have to use onedrive…
- kyriakos 2y ago
  I see a lot of people complaining about this, what exactly is wrong with onedrive as opposed to Google drive or Dropbox? Haven't used Dropbox in many years. They all just sync files which is what I need them for.
  - anytime5704 2y ago
    I’m just one person. So take my opinion for what it is: just my opinion. I started using Dropbox in high school and it has always “just worked”. I use the native app on Windows, iOS, and OSX. It’s essentially a virtual drive on all my devices and it backs up all my phone’s pictures and videos automatically. I can probably count on one hand the number of times Dropbox has annoyed me in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s overpriced, but at least it’s reliable. That’s worth a lot to me. I experimented with Google drive as an alternative in college. It worked pretty well on android devices, but there was just enough friction on other OS’s that I abandoned it as a general file system. My g drive is basically just a graveyard of Google docs that I will never care to organize and random gmail attachments that ended up there for whatever reason. Onedrive is by far the last choice I would make. My only experiences with it are (1) when Microsoft tries to force it on me/upsell me when I’m using office on my personal desktop or (2) when an employer uses it as their approved file sharing system. In my experience, it is consistently the least reliable of the three solutions. While Dropbox “just works”, I fully expect Onedrive to “just make me restart my computer, sign out and back in again, give up and just share the thing through slack.” Again, just my experience.

int_19h 2y ago

You can still buy Office 2024 as a proper app without any of that cloud stuff if you want to.

725686 2y ago
Could you please point me where to buy it?
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  Stacksocial has been doing Office promos for years. They're inexpensive, forever licenses but I'd guess they aren't transferable. I've bought a dozen or two. https://www.stacksocial.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=office https://www.stacksocial.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=offi... Techspot has deals on Office 2024. https://www.techspot.com/news/96637-microsoft-office-lifetime-license.html https://www.techspot.com/news/96637-microsoft-office-lifetim...
  - mh- 2y ago
    Wasn't aware of these sort of deals.. would love something like this for the Adobe suite.
    - bubblethink 2y ago
      The ultra cheap ones are grey market. Someone reselling something they are technically not supposed to.
      - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
        I'm familiar with greymaket sellers but these aren't them. Stacksocial brokers software deals as fundraisers for major websites. They've been around a long time.
  - switch007 2y ago
    Stacksocial looks like one of those many dodgy sites selling licenses of questionable origin How can you be sure they are bona fide Microsoft licenses?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

danpalmer 2y ago

I've long felt that consumer acceptance of this pricing correlates with whether the subscription has a cost-of-good-sold component. Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.

gruez 2y ago
>and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service. You underestimate the technical sophistication of the average user. Even with perfect docs, there's going to be 1% (or whatever) of customers that call into technical support asking questions. That's essentially COGS.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support. In the same way, marketing costs vary wildly per sale and are very hard to attribute, which is why marketing is usually not a part of the COGS.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support. By that logic, do cloud companies need to factor storage costs into COGS? Most people don't store exactly 1TB when they get the 1TB plan, and many don't use anywhere near that amount. Does that mean dropbox can pretend their offering has 100% margins? Sounds unlikely. The principle of accounting is that the numbers should reflect the actual business. Customer support costs don't have to be allocated to sales with 100% accuracy, but they can't pretend it doesn't impact unit economics either.

duxup 2y ago

Office suites are particularly annoying as for a home user ... most people don't use much at all. If it wasn't for the office sort of standard, you can get away with just not using an office suite, lots of good options out there. Free / surprisingly capable apps.

ndriscoll 2y ago
I'm weird and use TeX for my resume because I'm an annoying nerd, but I literally have not encountered an Office document in over a decade. I see Google workspace at work for my last couple jobs, and there's libreoffice if I occasionally want a spreadsheet at home. Everything I encounter from banks and governments is web or pdf these days.
- duxup 2y ago
  For personal stuff I agree, I haven't found an office suite necessary.

Workaccount2 2y ago

Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add". Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.

gruez 2y ago
That sort of exists. You heard of home service plans? You pay a fixed fee to some provider, and they the cost to send a plumber/hvac guy/whatever if something breaks. For software, instead of getting your toilet unclogged, you get small features and bug fixes.
- cj 2y ago
  Exactly this. All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together. So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment. They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix. Private equity is an underrated danger to society.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    Any way we could fight this? It seems things are getting worse and worse and I don’t see any solution
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      DIY it. Our dryer stopped heating, so I popped the screws off and it turns out the heating coil had burned out. Like $20 on Amazon. Our kitchen sink's faucet cracked and started leaking down the hose into the cabinet below so I bought a new one at Lowe's for like $20. Our oven stopped heating and the clock area where the control circuit is located kept clicking so I gave it a good smack like the primate I am. Free.

gruez 2y ago

>I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day. You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette. https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide filter for "office"

netsharc 2y ago
Huh, there must be(tm) a scanner for malware for these files. I know they're XML, although I wonder how much of it end up being base64-encoded binary blobs...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
userbinator 2y ago
untrusted docx/xlsx file Contrary to what the propaganda wants you to think, I suspect the majority of people who have the brain to oppose are not opening every file that's sent to them by strangers.
- gruez 2y ago
  The "majority" of people probably aren't clicking on untrusted links either, but we still advise people to keep their browsers up to date. Many people also need to open .docx files from strangers because it's part of their profession/business. Small business owners need to read RFPs and pay invoices, and jobseekers might need to open a questionnaire from a potential employer, all of which could be in .docx. The sender doesn't even have to be malicious. It's possible for one person, who's used to opening untrusted documents on a regular basis (eg. recruiter), to get infected, and for the malware to infect other documents that person sends to others (eg. finance).

scarface_74 2y ago

Dropbox’s 2TB plan is $120. Office 365 is $129 with 1TB each for 6 users.

what-the-grump 2y ago
And you get anti-virus and credit monitoring with that...

TZubiri 2y ago

So we should pay google engineers for making a saas app. But we should fire microsoft engineers for making a cost efficient binary. Not saying that's wrong, just reframing. Also this debate is so 2000s, we've been over this, things need updates, for security at least. Who's gonna pay for it.

Hilift 2y ago

Windows Enterprise edition has been subscription-only licensing for several years. The lowest edition cost is about twice that of Professional over a five year period.

zugi 2y ago

> I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era. True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost. Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable. Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.

tomjen3 2y ago

A few gigs? It is (or was) cheaper to signup for 365 than by the same storage in dropbox. It is cheaper to get that package than get Zoom.

darthwalsh 2y ago
Right, I've never heard 1,000 called "a few!"

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era. I have Office 2010 on an old computer." Statement #1 will trigger a stream of HN replies that ignore statement #2 and attempt to justify the price increase from $0 in 2010 to whatever Microsoft is charging today. It is anyone's guess why this happens. The old computer is the author's personal computer, not one owned by an employer with a "Professional/Enterprise" license. This is clear from the final sentence of the comment. The author is not the only recreational user who still has an old computer with Office 2010 (I have some other past versions of Office as well) and is aware of the con.

centur 2y ago

You still can buy Office standalone licenses with Classic Office (aka desktop apps). I got myself 2019 and 2021 versions (different OSes) and prefer them. However I've a personal MS365 subscription for business, I like permanent licenses for products more. On a related note - I bought some permanent licenses for devtools, where they advertised subscription model only :) Directly reached developers and asked if it's possible or not. Works well for both sides - I probably paid for the tool more than their average subscription lifetime, but I've got few tools that I need to use occasionally but over a longer period of time - e.g. one tool I used maybe 10-15 times, but over a 7 years. That does not work with bigger companies though :(