22 ms·
Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
- jhaskldjfhskj 11mo ago[dead]
- reactordev 11mo agothe era of ai enshitification begins with trying to recoup the costs...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- lenerdenator 11mo agoThat's an interesting way to make up for missing revenue targets.
- Mistletoe 11mo agoThey saw what the Xbox division is doing and said give me some of that.
- jack_tripper 11mo agoXbox 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,.
- abrouwers 11mo agoI 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.
- PunchyHamster 11mo agoWhich would be fine if acquisitions they made made some great games instead of just... okay to kinda bad. Hell, even Call of Duty somehow underperformed
- jack_tripper 11mo ago>I don't think the price hikes have been received terribly well What did I say?
- abrouwers 11mo agoSorry, 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.
- JSR_FDED 11mo agoCopilot in every nook and cranny…that stuff costs money!
- goku12 11mo agoIn that case, a lot of software is going to raise their subscription prices. I don't think any AI provider is making profits with these integrations.
- mrweasel 10mo agoShouldn't CoPilot make the thing cheaper? Less need for skilled developers, faster development cycles? Microsoft increasing prices on a subscription product is an admission that their AI play is failing. The project sucks up money and yields none of the promised returns. Failure to deliver on development, failure to optimize datacenters, failure to reduce required staff in general.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- puttycat 11mo agoIs 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.)
- throw03172019 11mo agoI 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!
- ok123456 11mo agoThis will ruin the formatting randomly. I would not do this if you're working on a deadline.
- hypeatei 11mo ago"is there any reason to use Office other than <literally every profession using it>?" No, I don't think so. I either sail the high seas or subscribe for a month or two when job searching then toss it when I'm done.
- EvanAnderson 11mo agoFor 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.
- bix6 11mo agoDo you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?
- 11mo ago
- _lvbh 11mo agoThis 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
- mc32 11mo agoGoogle was increasing their pricing too. Also before last year they were charging an extra license for Gemini but then decided to throw it in.
- emadb 11mo agoOther than Google, what are other competitors that worth evaluating?
- Bombthecat 11mo agoOpen source... But yeah.. ms won this game
- sneak 11mo agoThere is no foss competitor to Excel.
- ambicapter 11mo agoGoogle Docs works fine for most people though (not FOSS, but most Office customers don't care).
- mc32 11mo agoIt’s about the same price without the AzureAD stuff or AV integration even if substandard. Also Google emasculated its Google sites.
- aerostable_slug 10mo agoMy 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.
- Havoc 11mo agoThe family plan was already noticeably more expensive this year on Black Friday (roughly +20% over prior year). Already moved all my usage away from MS…now just need to persuade rest of fam
- zkmon 11mo agoWhile 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?
- flakeoil 11mo agoLibreOffice 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.
- gtirloni 11mo ago> most use it for compatibility sake 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). Their subscription could be much cheaper.
- spogbiper 10mo agoIt 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.
- wongarsu 11mo agoConsidering 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
- crazygringo 11mo agoSeriously. I don't understand why this is even news or posted here. If they were doubling prices or something then of course, raise the alarms. This is not that.
- snuxoll 10mo agoA 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.
- crazygringo 10mo ago5% is 5%. If you have more employees, you also presumably have more revenue. That's why percentages rather than absolutes are the right metric. And keeping up with inflation isn't "jacking up pricing".
- cfn 11mo agoThe 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?
- SomeHacker44 11mo agoMy OneDrive went from 70 to 100 USD. That is a huge increase.
- 7thpower 11mo agoI 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.
- boh 11mo agoIf 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.
- Angostura 11mo agoI'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.
- bombcar 11mo agoMultiplayer PowerPoint is the single largest advance in the business world since the spreadsheet. If used properly.
- harry8 10mo agoThe ironic thing about satire is that sometimes it is very difficult to tell apart from the thing being satirized. So, like, was that satire? I got a good laugh out of "Multiplayer PowerPoint" either way.
- rs186 10mo agoIf 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.
- azalemeth 10mo agoThis is why Google Docs was so revolutionary... In 2006.
- throwaway613745 11mo agoNobody is buying Co-Pilot so....fuggit...jack up the price! What is anyone gonna do about it? Leave? lmao
- bhouston 11mo agoHaven'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.
- sneak 11mo agoWay more convenient for the FAA702 users, too. 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.
- unethical_ban 11mo agoThat you would mind. But yes your point is correct.
- bhouston 10mo agoI 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 https://ocs.ca. It includes various edibles too.
- gary_0 11mo agoThey 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.
- hypeatei 11mo ago> They can set whatever price they want 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.
- gary_0 11mo agoI 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.
- hypeatei 11mo agoYes, 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?
- gary_0 11mo ago
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- LeoWattenberg 11mo agoI bet the folks of the state Schleswig-Holstein are celebrating right now, having switched away from it recently https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Holstein-relies-on-Open-Source-and-saves-millions-11105459.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
- hereme888 10mo agoShould be the standard for modern governments.
- kome 11mo agothey increased the price also last year... i went back to pirating after, dunno, 15 years or more.
- baggachipz 11mo agoThat often wrong and unnecessary AI bullshit ain't gonna pay for itself!
- TheJoeMan 11mo agoThey 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. [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-publisher-will-no-longer-be-supported-after-october-2026-ee6302a2-4bc7-4841-babf-8e9be3acbfd7 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-publish...
- Mountain_Skies 11mo agoWeird 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.
- mosura 11mo agoThe reality is DTP outside of pro sectors (i.e. these days InDesign) was rendered worthless by how ubiquitous the tooling was. In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home.
- dybber 11mo agoAnd for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
- traceroute66 11mo ago> 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.
- sharts 11mo agoWho still uses this garbage? None of these products have meaningfully improved since Office ‘97 —and that was like peak Office
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- commandlinefan 11mo agoI 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.
- sylens 11mo agoThe 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.
- lewisjoe 11mo agoAt 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.
- _fat_santa 11mo ago> 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.
- creata 10mo ago> All of these are compatible with Office formats. To a limited extent, for the reasons that the person you're replying to laid out.
- goku12 11mo ago> 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.
- sigzero 11mo agoI wish they would allow Microsoft Family to have personal domains again. :(
- mrbluecoat 11mo agoSwitched to the free OnlyOffice a year ago and never looked back: https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE
- AnonHP 11mo agoWow, 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). Any gotchas to be aware of with OnlyOffice?
- baal80spam 10mo agohttps://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office is a thing as well, and I prefer it to Only Office. The maker is German.
- k8sToGo 10mo agoIt's a bit slower performance wise
- hex-m 10mo agoIt can't handle OpenDocument files (odt, odp, ods) well. Only a one-way import is supported. https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/docs/userguides/document_editor/supportedformats.aspx https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/docs/userguides/document_e... There are parts that are not released under a Free Software license but that's unclear from their marketing-communication. #openWashing
- zerofor_conduct 10mo agohere is a (somewhat biased) comparison between OnlyOffice and Collabora Online https://www.collaboraonline.com/comparing-collabora-with-onlyoffice/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/comparing-collabora-with-onl...
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- piker 11mo agoMicrosoft raising prices on Office?! Must be for all those new useful features brought to your desktop over the last decade. Definitely not monopolistic rent-seeking. No siree. If you or someone you love is a legal user and interested in checking out an in-development word processor built for lawyers, please consider Tritium. It's free to download: https://tritium.legal/download https://tritium.legal/download or check out the web version: https://tritium.legal/preview https://tritium.legal/preview
- jraph 11mo agoYeah, 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.
- piker 11mo agoYes, 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. What we're attempting :)
- jraph 11mo ago> 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)
- chris_wot 11mo agoThey got into major shit in Australia for their way of increasing prices. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for-allegedly-misleading-millions-of-australians-over-microsoft-365-subscriptions https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...
- insane_dreamer 11mo agoThe 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).
- bux93 10mo agoDOCX is a terrible format though. If you don't need to edit a document, PDF is more reliable. If you do need to edit, DOCX will invariably fudge up headings, numbering, ToCs, alignment of images/figures, keep-together not working properly for captions or tables, etc. I think for the second usecase someone ought to introduce a completely new format that handles this a lot better. Or maybe the format is already there and it's ePub? But then what's needed is an editor (on-prem server and local portable executable) that has the nice things like automatic ToC generation, foot/endnotes, track changes/document comparison, online collaboration.
- insane_dreamer 10mo ago> DOCX is a terrible format though. Agreed but it doesn't matter, because it is the de-facto standard. (Personally, I think WordPerfect was the better doc standard, with visible attribute tags in the text that could be edited.) > If you don't need to edit a document, PDF is more reliable. Yes, but the reason you're using a word processor in the first place is because you need to edit the document.
- jmcphers 10mo agoMicrosoft was successfully sued by the EU for creating vendor lockin with their proprietary file formats. It is for this reason that the "X" formats (docx, pptx, etc.) are "open" and thoroughly "documented", e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-docx/728a7abc-7f55-40dc-90a7-1276ff53c8b2 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards... However, the formats are incredibly complicated, because they evolved from earlier formats that represented nearly the entire in-memory state of the editing software. To a first order of approximation, the .doc format _was_ Microsoft Word. Source: I worked at Microsoft during this time period and helped document the XLSX format.
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- jve 11mo agoThere are also positive news in Dataverse: Environments get some free capacity upgrade: https://licensing.guide/december-2025-dataverse-default-capacity-changes-illustrated/ https://licensing.guide/december-2025-dataverse-default-capa...
- ochronus 11mo agoOoooh but it has AI ;) blergh
- xaxaxb 11mo agoLibreOffice
- skeledrew 11mo agoWell, 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.
- SomeHacker44 11mo agoI 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).
- FpUser 10mo agoI stopped paying for MsOffice as soon as they've introduces Office 365. I saw where the ball was going. Sticking with the alternatives
- CodeCompost 10mo agoWhy do I, as a European, have to pay for Trumpflation?
- guywithahat 10mo agoYou 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
- Workaccount2 10mo agoMost people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
- binarymax 10mo agoThe only main feature post 98 is that the file format is zipped xml documents. Before that it was proprietary binaries.
- pjmlp 10mo agoLambdas, PowerQuery and Python support on Excel aren't in Excel 98.
- cosmic_cheese 10mo agoI 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.
- charlieyu1 10mo agoI 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.
- SilentM68 10mo agoHoorah for Libre Office :)
- KellyCriterion 10mo ago25%++ up in my region (EU)
- jkhall81 10mo agoWPS - Free tier
- qingcharles 10mo agoAs 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...]
- IshKebab 10mo agoI'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.
- varispeed 10mo agoInteresting. Businesses I know banned use of anything cloud based, especially if the hosting is owned by the US company.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoThis 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.
- aydyn 10mo agoDoes anyone else remember when it was possible to include interactive graphs ala plotly in powerpoint? Because it isn't possible now. Office just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. The only thing they have going for them is vendor lock-in, and that's sad.
- amanzi 10mo agoHere 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. 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/microsoft-365-plans-and-pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic... And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...
- wvenable 10mo ago> 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.
- dabockster 10mo ago> 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.
- codethief 10mo agoI 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?
- ReptileMan 10mo agoCan I pay them more to remove all AI crap from the platforms?
- fpauser 10mo agoNope.
- indolering 10mo agoThe 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.
- mecdu92 10mo agoTo 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)
- sidcool 10mo agoLikely to fund their AI misadventures?
- mrandish 10mo agoThey 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.
- raincole 10mo agoWeird 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.
- delichon 10mo agoI 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.
- 29athrowaway 10mo agoThis office suite is less known but great: https://www.freeoffice.com/ https://www.freeoffice.com/
- unixhero 10mo agoWow now where did this come from??? Never heard of it :)
- 29athrowaway 10mo agoEveryone is obsessed with LibreOffice, the grandchild of the slow and ugly Sun StarOffice.
- unixhero 10mo agoYes, but Libreoffice has been refactored and reengineered so much now that very little remains of the old codebase.
- jdsully 10mo agoAnecdotally I’m starting to see a more people switch to my spreadsheet app. Not something that should be possible if the MS ecosystem was healthy. https://www.sumbuddy.net https://www.sumbuddy.net
- abixb 10mo ago>" One interpretation is that the extra $10 billion from the price increases will offset some of the red ink Microsoft is bleeding because of the investments they’re making in datacenter capacity, hardware, and software needed to make Copilot useful" Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.
- mock-possum 10mo agoReally weird considering google docs and libre office exist - what do you get if you pay m$?
- hulitu 10mo ago> Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices Well, the RAM prices had gone up and they need to buy more hard drives for your confidential documents, stored on OneDrive.
- tpoacher 10mo ago2026 will be the year of the Libreoffice desktop!
- noobermin 10mo agoHeroic. With all the problems with Microsoft products lately, they can just increase prices just like that. A sign of a healthy market and actual existing capitalism.
- docmars 10mo agoYou will subscribe and be happy, and when the prices increase, you will have no choice but to keep paying or you will lose access to the thing you've paid more than enough for in a lifetime, for features you never asked for.
- downrightmike 10mo agoY u no want copilot???
- realaaa 10mo agoI cannot believe people here are defending this and they are like Okay price increases are normal I guess we get what we deserve after all.. Who's coming on board the self-hosted Nextcloud etc train? choo choo !
- pvtmert 10mo agoAmazon ($AMZN) has moved to M365 in an “all-in” fashion just this year. Being maintained an old (2016?) on-premise exchange server and share-point installations for 10 years… I wonder how it will fit with the “Frugality” LP.
- wkat4242 10mo agoOne thing I can't find is what the new prices will be for the versions without teams. There's special EEA versions of those SKUs. Or will they just not change? I don't use much of it (just email and onedrive) and I can even drop onedrive if I need to (so just use exchange online plan 1). But if the teams-less version is not rising in price I might stick with that.
- melonpan7 10mo agoI truly despise all Microsoft software, from Windows 10/11 to SQL Server, Visual Studio and lastly Office/M365. But enterprises love it and it will often cost them millions to migrate to something else.
- ManBeardPc 10mo agoMy next company‘s boss was pretty much Windows only (server and desktops/laptops, some Linux servers). Linux on the server was already replacing more and more machines. Now I am even allowed to use MacBooks or Linux laptops. Current company is already using the Google suite, MS Office was an exception if required for some reason. I saw the same shift with Oracle. Previously nearly everyone wanted Oracle as a DB, then the price increases got too much and everyone who could switched to alternatives like MySQL or Postgres.
- nicbou 10mo agoI have already ditched Office a decade ago in favour of Google Docs. It was not a dogmatic decision, I just did not see the value.
- thot_experiment 10mo agoI know that modern office has xlookup and other niceties, but if you're not a power user Office 97 off archive.org is like 200mb installed, works just fine on win 10 or under wine, and has the benefit of being written 28 years ago so on a modern computer everything happens imperceptibly fast. I installed the 97 suite like 2 or 3 years ago and I've never looked back.
- swiftcoder 10mo agoHonestly not sure I've ever used any of the new Office features past maybe Office 2000
- GCUMstlyHarmls 10mo agoIs there a reason to use this over LibreOffice? I had until this year a pretty old machine (~11-12 years old at time of replacement, upper midrange at time of purchase) and I never felt like it was slow -- possibly because everything was slow on that machine though and I was stuck in a forest...
- dijit 10mo agoLibreOffice definitely feels sluggish. I give it a pass because it's doing complicated things, it's free software and I also temper my expectations slightly because it's a Java GUI application (and I expect those to be slow). I would certainly not expect it to be more performant than Office '97.
- zoobab 10mo agoBeing written in Java there is no surprise here.
- hex-m 10mo agoIf you want LibreOffice with less Java, you should try Collabora Office. https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-online-now-available-on-desktop/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-online-now-av... (I'm not affiliated)
- shantnutiwari 10mo agoI cancelled my personal O365 subscription for this reason, even though I prefer Word to LibreOffice and the crap my Mac provides-- it wasnt just they raised the price, it was the new "AI" features they kept pushing. When I cancelled, I made it clear why I was doing it. But I doubt anyone reads the feedback we provide
- unixhero 10mo agoI use the personal subscription for the onedrive storage for my phones fotos
- fpauser 10mo agoEnshittification at its best.
- exasperaited 10mo agoWell how else are you going to pay for the AI they want? You have to understand the basic consumer SaaA contract of the 21st century: - We give them money and agree terms and they do things to us that we didn't ask for that they want to do - They change the terms of the agreement to allow it, we occasionally spot their attempts to grab new rights in the process, and they back away a little as if it was just some sort of silly mistake. - Repeat.
- teekert 10mo agoIn the Netherlands I have spotted the first large company offering Nextcloud as an alternative: [0] I'm thinking of pivoting my Bioinformatics services company to more of a "sovereign systems" provider. I build a ton of infra for a small startup, it's all Nucs and beefier systems throwing data around. [0] https://www.kpn.com/zakelijk/grootzakelijk/modern-workplace/empower-nextcloud https://www.kpn.com/zakelijk/grootzakelijk/modern-workplace/...
- nisegami 10mo agoO365 and other Microsoft products are a massive, massive drain on valuable foreign exchange for third world countries like mine. If it were up to me, I would outlaw paying Microsoft for anything in my country.
- shevy-java 10mo agoWe need to create an office suite that really allows us to get rid of those milking corporations. I am not just thinking LibreOffice - I am actually thinking that an office suite can be used globally AND can also be at the least in part be co-funded by governments. The exact amount and procedure I omit here (can be many things), but it is no longer acceptable that a single greedy corporation keeps on milking schools for money. (To those wondering why not LibreOffice - I am not saying not LibreOffice; but I am not sure how well LibreOffice's model fits to e. g. having a suite of office-related software that can be employed by every government, school, university, company etc... perhaps the code base is not well-written. Do we already have the co-editing functionality online? So that I could modify the document of an elderly person and then create a .pdf file. I can do so locally of course, but I want to be able to modify that on another, approved before-hand computer. Right now I have to carry an USB stick, and then modify locally, which is also possible, but I'd much prefer in-built solutions here. This is just one example of many many more. We need an improved LibreOffice here.)
- buccal 10mo agoSpeaking of online use please see: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs
- Steve16384 10mo agoI don't think it needs one specific alternative; if the protocols they shared were all open and useable, small pieces could be replaced slowly over time.
- wolfi1 10mo agowouldn't it be more honest to call it M355 rather than M365?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- hansmayer 10mo agoAh, how surprising :) And at a time when they desperately need to show that the AI strategy is paying off, so they are probably framing the pricing hike with the "new AI features" - same how google did recently with workspace.
- David_0101 10mo ago[dead]
- qubex 10mo agoI’m the insufferable Apple fanboy that chimes in to mention Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I have a personal subscription to Office 365 for interoperability but I’ve been annoyed by their inescapable AI price hike and now this. I might as well just cancel my subscription. Excel for Apple doesn’t even have PowerQuery and PowerPivot, so it’s already a diminished experience.