10 ms·
There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too
by shiroiuma 11mo ago
There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope.
Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
- xstas1 11mo agoThey're working on it.
- vee-kay 11mo agoStarting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose. Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads. The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers. Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.
- shiroiuma 11mo agoThey are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do. A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits. And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?
- vee-kay 11mo agoOracle did the same cheap dirty trick for profits, when it is bundled adware/spyware (Ask toolbar) by default on its JRE (Java Runtime Installer) used on millions of corporate and student/home PCs, because it knew Java/JRE would already be whitelisted on those machines (Java gets updates, so IT admins tend to whitelist its EXEcutable and its installer (JRE installer), since it is necessary for corporate work (many legacy software depend on Java)). Suddenly, many IT admins were in a tough spot explaining to many internal customers (including senior management; even CxO's have Java on their office laptops) why their PCs were suddenly flooded with popup ads and even ads on intranet sites (because Ask toolbar integrated into the browser)). Google used to have a motto/policy of "Do Not Evil", but it silently dropped that approach. It had to do so, because its biggest rivals had already adopted and profited from the evil attitudes, so it too simply followed the evil tide. The world has always been ruled by the oligarchs (the richest and most powerful people), but in modern era, it is the biggest corporates (especially trillion dollar valuation companies) that call the shots. And they continue do as they please, bending even powerful nations to their will.
- lovich 11mo agoEvery now and then I forget why the common man hates our industry nowadays, but luckily this forum always reminds me
- dabockster 10mo agoHN is such a meme at this point for all the bad reasons. It's why I'd bail on this site again if other social media wasn't worse. "Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192577
- pxeboot 11mo ago> Have people switched en masse to them? Nope. Business, sure, but there are millions of consumers who exclusively use Google Docs, iWork, or other Office alternatives.
- shiroiuma 11mo agoYeah, but they're already gone, and you can only milk them for so much. Businesses and governments are a totally different matter: they're not going to switch to the alternatives no matter what, so MS could make a lot more profit by jacking up their prices massively. $10,000 per user per year is totally doable I think.
- esafak 11mo agoGovernments in Europe are increasingly ditching Microsoft, goaded by souring relations between the continents.
- 6510 11mo agoDon't underestimate the rage from citizens who receive important documents and sheets in formats they can't open. Or you can open them but with a warning that some functionality might be lost. (reads like: you might go to prison)
- couscouspie 11mo agoThat's a Microsoft problem, not a FOSS problem though.
- anonzzzies 11mo agoMy gov is moving 100% of documents, forms, official stuff to web based without browser plugins. Of course unfortunately if you want to download/print (...) it will be pdf, but outside that, all filling in, editing, reading etc of all citizen facing materials must be possible with a modern web browser. If PDF is only the export for the final doc, I am ok with it; I can fill ut with whatever browser on whatever device. This should be the mandatory basics imho.
- 6510 11mo agoHarmonyOS is gaining a lot of traction in China and has WPS pre-installed https://www.wps.com https://www.wps.com I've never used it but apparently it comes with ingame purchases.
- tallanvor 11mo agoWhich is perfectly fine for China, but no western government or company who hopes to do business with them will consider this, and for good reason.
- 6510 11mo agohah, my comment appears much more naive than I thought possible. WPS apparently has 80% market share in Chinese government and state owned enterprise. They used MS from 2000-2005, In 2006 they released Uniform Office Format (UOF) which MS doesn't support(!?) UOF works better with Chinese fonts. 2012 Kingsoft offered Enterprise WPS and became the standard.
- dabockster 10mo agoAnd ODF is largely a EU standard that people online love to pretend is universally used.
- paulddraper 11mo agoSuggesting libreoffice as an alternative to Office 365 is crazy.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoWhy? What feature does office 365 have that is so difficult to replace? I'm guessing support but... is there something more obvious? Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades.
- lll-o-lll 11mo agoOne word. Cloud. Sharepoint, onedrive, teams. Everything is integrated and collaborating is trivial. You can’t replicate that with open source.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoOk, but surely google docs does that just as well or even better? I have never even heard of sharepoint and onedrive!
- what-the-grump 11mo ago[flagged]
- rewgs 11mo agoGoogle Docs is not the comparison here. Google Workspace is.
- protocolture 11mo agoNope.
- lenkite 11mo agoI can believe you not hearing about Sharepoint. But not hearing about Onedrive is basically impossible if you have used a Windows machine in the last decade.
- chii 11mo agoYou are looking from the perspective of a user of the software - sure, these have enough feature parity to "compete". But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives. How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking work? How does audit work? And that's just the surface. Needs for large enterprises, where you cannot just have John from HR make a new account for the new hire, are often not met by the opensource world.
- shiroiuma 11mo agoLarge enterprises were doing this stuff with Unix and mainframes long before Microsoft figured out what preemptive multitasking was.
- sharpy 11mo agoAnd decided that it was cheaper and easier to just outsource it to Microsoft. Because doing it in today's environment - different work computers, backend servers, mobile devices, etc - is much more complicated than just managing permissions on a mainframe.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- 1718627440 11mo agoDistributed databases are a solved problem (besides maybe performance). Offloading account management to arbitrary databases too. Why everyone is using Microsoft is, because then they have someone to blame, instead of needing to point at themselves.
- lomase 11mo agoActiveDirectory is million times better than any other solution on the market.
- wombatpm 11mo agoYou are arguing the Oracle strategy, raise prices until it hurts, throw up roadblocks to switching and raise them some more.
- calenti 11mo agoYeah, capitalism. Our sense of fairness hate it but our portfolios love it.
- cHaOs667 11mo agoAs chiii already pointed out, you are looking at the wrong end of the spectrum. Decision in Enterprise organizations are not done by the end user and non of your options, not even Google Docs, offers the equality of features. M365 is far more than just Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams (apart from some apps depending on the M365 tier you are in like Access, Project, Visio etc.), you buy a whole workspace. Users can seamlessly share and work together on documents, not only in their organization but also with others. It's easy to process information from one app to the other etc. Yes, Google Docs might be the closest thing when it comes to features (but no match), however, looking at local restrictions and laws, Microsoft is one of the few companies that can host you M365 solution in an environment that, for example, matches european laws. And that is the big problem, there are no alternatives for companies that are already on M365 and using the features of it.
- calenti 11mo ago"Seamless" may be irrationally exuberant but it's better than the others _at scale_. LibreOffice, etc. may see similar from the UI end but if you're scaling across multiple sites/archetypes/employee models/regulatory environments, -and- want access to a wide and deep pool of administrative labor, M365 is seamless by comparison.
- dabockster 10mo ago> Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold? *bald eagle screeches* Ahem... https://www.ftc.gov/ https://www.ftc.gov/ They may have an issue with that.