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Individual users can make use of free alternatives pretty easily, but I’m not sure they’re actually the target for the price increase here.
Schools, governments, businesses, and other institutions pay wild amounts to MS every year.
The same tool that can be used to permanently activate a Windows install can be used to permanently activate an Office install as well; including 365.
Oh, and the tool to do so is open-source.
Or you could just dump Microsoft entirely (unless you need Excel in particular). Either way, it's free.
Oh, wow, I didn't realize masgravel license 365 too.
Individuals can do that, and they should if they feel like keeping MS.
Organizations are, unfortunately, probably going to remain stagnant and keep paying millions to for things that have free alternatives.
It’s actually really infuriating. When I was in grad school I filed an information request with the college to see how much they paid for access to Office 365 each year. This was in 2021 and they were paying 4 million a year. Meanwhile their grad student employees were all living deeply below the poverty line.
Organizations aren’t just paying for access to applications, they’re also paying for cloud storage, email hosting, calendar tools, training, and all of the infrastructure to support that. Typically when you price out the cost of expanding the in-house IT department and the cost of acquiring and maintaining the infrastructure required to replicate the various cloud services, it ends up being break even at best. Qualified people who can set up and maintain infrastructure are quite expensive, especially when having to maintain high uptime/availability, 24/7 incident response, and compliance with various regulations, like those to protect students’ privacy.
They’re speed running their product enshitification.
Video summary by Ollama AI:
The video discusses several shady practices employed by Microsoft, including:
- Forced upselling: Microsoft changed the plan and pricing of a user's Office 365 subscription without their consent, effectively forcing them to pay more for features they didn't want.
- Renaming and hiding plans: Microsoft renamed an existing plan (e.g., "Personal" to "Classic") and made it less visible in the user interface, while introducing a new plan with similar features at a higher price point.
- Hallucination problem: The AI-powered feature "co-pilot" generated fabricated information, which is a known issue in generative AI.
- Overpromising free benefits: Microsoft sales representatives touted "free AI credits" as a benefit of the more expensive plan, but these credits were not actually free and had limited value.
- Misleading users about pricing changes: The price hike was effectively hidden by renaming and rebranding existing plans, making it unclear whether the user's subscription had actually changed in price.
The video suggests that Microsoft engaged in these practices to push customers into using features they might not want or need, rather than providing transparent and honest information about their plans and pricing.
Is this using ollama on the console?
I've been missing out on great ai use cases if I can just ask it to summarize a YouTube link.
No. I used Open WebUI.
https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
It’s a UI for ollama. You can share links and ask it questions about the link provided or upload a document such as user manuals to get answers from such documents.
It’s a great tool that utilize Ollama to its full potential.
shoutout to massgrave.dev
I know people mentioned the free alternatives, but if the subscription is really just for office, then why not buy a license to a non web based office version? They do still make them, as much as they want to remove them completely. You can even get them heavily discounted off 3rd party sites. I got my copy of 2019 for like $20 a year before it went EOL and I'm still using it because I really don't have the highest use for it. If you want office 2021, which is good with support until end of 2026, it's about $50 right now but I see them go lower all the time and can probably get it for $30. This is the pro version as well. Sadly I don't see office 2024 for sale yet on my site but I guarantee it will be a year from now.
Could you name the site for people who could really use this?
I got my Windows 11 key and office key from here:
https://shop.lifehacker.com/sales/microsoft-office-professional-2021-for-windows-lifetime-license-5
There may be better places but the prices were better than I expected so I tried it. Site was fine, and both licenses worked perfectly. I think i saw get another 15% offer if your a new user so don't forget to sign up at the bottom to get more off your first purchase. I actually see office 2024 as well now and it's a bit much at $160, but from what I see Amazon and newegg are selling it for $250. I would still wait, I honestly have no idea what new stuff they ever add that is useful to me anymore, 2021 is probably fine for $100 less.
Not the site you're looking for, but Massgravel's MAS (GitHub link) works just fine to activate any office or Windows install for free.
Not really 100% legal, but seeing as the scripts have been available on a M$ platform without being taken down it's pretty safe to assume M$ doesn't care. (They make their money from enterprise customers anyways)
I was using office 2007 still on windows 10 before I switched to Linux. Old versions are really cheap.
I’ve dropped Microsoft Office for OnlyOffice and so far I have no regrets. The one issues it has, on MacOS only, is that it does not support multiple windows. There is a workaround using the command line I believe. Otherwise it is very good and the formulas are basically 1:1 with Excel.
why did you go w only office instead of LibreOffice?
The UI, LibreOffice looks like it’s stuck in 2007, OnlyOffice has basically the same UI as Microsoft Office. I know that’s a negative for a lot of people but it’s what I’m used to already.
fair enough.
honestly if i had my way i'd still use windows 98 and AI would have never been developed. same with facebook.
I did not know this. Will give it a try. Are formulas the same as in Excel? I really can’t be bothered to learn new formulas again and I need it to be 100% compatible with people working with office.
Been a moderate user of Excel but started a new budget in LibreOffice Calc recently and so far it seems 1:1, including using commands like VLOOKUP and SUMIF
It sounds more kinky
I just use the apps (pages, keynote, numbers) that come with MacOS. They can open and save office formats, and gets the job done for everyday stuff. Not for the power user, but most people aren’t. Also, keynote is better than PowerPoint.
I use pages and keynotes actually, I just really really don’t like numbers. I used it for a while and I really couldn’t get used to it.
My favourite part was one comment that said "If they simply let you turn off the Copilot stuff, you'd just be sitting there paying the increased fee"
Mine too. But i think they wont let you do that to bolster their AI usage numbers in front of investors. So even if it causes people to notice and make them less money, it might still be a net positive for share price.
Same thing Spotify did.
Does that mean there is a way to downgrade Spotify to remove audiobooks?
Yes, Basic plans.
I haven’t done office in a while. The inception of the subscription model killed it completely for me. Scrivener is better organized for big projects. And there’s plenty of small word programs that get the job done for things like resumes and such, in lieu of Microsoft Word.
I had an older student office disc. Microsoft wouldn’t allow installation.
And then Adobe stealthed onto my elderly parents computer and killed all their photo files. Demoralizing to say the least. They won’t even engage their favorite hobby any more.
The enshittification is real.
And then Adobe stealthed onto my elderly parents computer and killed all their photo files.
Could you elaborate on this ?
Wait what! Adobe killed photo files??
This dude from my rave days creeped me out so much and it turned out he’s a photo file
If they are on windows, did it just change the default program that opens photos? You can go in the properties and change the default program.
@zephorah @JokaJukka for me #libreoffice does everything I need in an office suite... I can understund why people have some trouble migrating tho... School are in fault for teaching ms office since ever...
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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