Summarizing video showing MS’ horrible practicies regarding Office 365’s subscription tiers, where they basically forcefully upgrade you to a higher tier subscription, and at the same time renaming the tier names so you won’t notice…
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.
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.
- Log into Microsoft Account
- Go to Subscriptions Page
- Choose 365 Subscription
- Choose Cancel option
- Choose to “switch” to Classic version
- Accept pop up which says you won’t be charged today, but will be charged on your regular annual subscription renewal date as usual
- Profit (well, not lose more)
- Log into Microsoft Account
- Go to Subscriptions Page
- Choose 365 Subscription
- Choose Cancel option
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.
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.
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.
Libreoffice also has a ribbon ui option
