• @[email protected]
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    256 hours ago

    Oh shit maybe we’ll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money

    • @[email protected]
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      126 hours ago

      Yeah. So it’s

      1. thunderbird
      2. some add-on

      right? I forget the name of that add-on.

      No, that’s not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that’s it. But it’s only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let’s ask Co-pilot again:

      THERE it is.

      But I learned there’s a second alternative, so that’s cool. See? Co-pilot has value!

      • @[email protected]
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        13 minutes ago

        Zentyal replaces windows server. It has active directory, file server, print server, domain controller and mail server, all in a way compatible with Microsofts products, but it’s Linux. I worked with it many years ago and it did what it says on the tin. I haven’t worked with newer versions.

        In this case the AI is kinda wrong. It’s not a Thunderbird replacement in any way, rather an OWA replacement and Exchange alternative. You could use Thunderbird to connect to it probably.

        What you could use is the Thunderbird extension TbSync, or Owl. Both work, but TbSync is free.

  • Soulifix
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    156 hours ago

    I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it’s 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 minutes ago

      Microsoft probably added or changed unnecessary shit to the OOXML format that your old version can’t handle.

      Do all documents open without any problems?

    • @theangryseal
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      23 hours ago

      Me too haha. One of the first things I install.

  • RickyWars1
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    298 hours ago

    For existing customers, the price hike won’t be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the “Classic” or “Basic” Microsoft 365 plans.

    Thankfully we can roll back to the “Classic Family Plan” without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn’t see this article I’d be up for a big price hike when it renewed.

    • @[email protected]
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      187 hours ago

      Everyone experiencing this should be thinking “man, I gotta ditch Microsoft before they try to fuck me again”

  • @Frostbeard
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    107 hours ago

    Fuck the MS suite is such garbage. My work was sold in for Teams with all the BS. Now I have to either map up the filepath creating what we used to have, or I can’t see the file folder and make a call at the same time. Onenote with it’s arbitrary syncing. And good luck finding it again since it stored at some random place if you loose access.

    Word and excel is decent, but for a person who likes to tinker with versions it’s a nightmare to invite people to edit it.

    Cluncky interface, slow and bloated all around

    • @[email protected]
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      85 hours ago

      The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.

  • Unruffled [he/him]
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    2510 hours ago

    “You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we’re done half baking it into all our apps and now we’re almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all.”

    The logic of the utterly deranged…

    • @[email protected]
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      6 hours ago

      Libre Office.

      Honestly - and flame away - I hate the name. I hate saying it. It’s the ‘moist’ of borrowed words. Leeeeeeeebr. And I’m a Canadian who did French up to university-level conversational “explain something for 20 min” French (from a gorgeous caribbean dynamo teacher, but I justif–uh, digress) so I know how to say the word and what it means.

      And I still hate it. I’m a horrible person – even before I continued French study because the prof was so engaging and energetic and brightened every room and every day and made French interesting just on inclusion.

      • Lemminary
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        17 minutes ago

        Glad I’m not the only one questioning the name! I have a pet theory that if they changed it it’d be more popular.

    • @[email protected]
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      1110 hours ago

      If smart people love libreoffice, then I must be dumb. Working with it always seems weird and I never like it.

      Fortunately, I can use LaTeX for work; it is far from without issues but while being arcane sometimes (especially when tables are involved), it never really upsets me and the result looks very good. I can say neither for libreoffice or MS office. But at least the former doesn’t charge for the experience.

      I hope typst gains more traction; it seems really intuitive compared to TeX and you don’t necessarily need a macro package. And while it doesn’t produce the quality of TeX-based systems yet, it is already good. Then again, Knuth’s goal first and foremost goal was quality (and it shows); the system just had to be usable by him.

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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      410 hours ago

      Don’t forget GPT4All or JanAI, for those rare instances that you want to converse with a dumbass.

  • katy ✨
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    169 hours ago

    why not just do:

    microsoft 365: 6.99

    microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99

    blobcat, think

    • Romkslrqusz
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      118 hours ago

      … second paragraph of the article:

      In addition to the basic plans getting Copilot rolled in, there are now additional “Basic,” “Personal Classic,” and “Family Classic” tiers without Copilot and “other advanced features” added for users who do not use AI in their workflows

    • Wioum
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      219 hours ago

      You damn well know why they dont do that $$$

    • @[email protected]
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      26 hours ago

      why not just do:

      microsoft 365: 6.99

      microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99

      Make the easy thing the better-for-sales thing, obviously.

      But seriously, negative-approval has been a sales enabler for ever. People will often just roll over and accept it vs churning to something else. That’s why ‘loss-leader’ works, as people will start with one product and sunk-cost fallacy will keep them from churning as the vendor tightens the screw.

  • @[email protected]
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    5412 hours ago

    You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.

    • katy ✨
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      109 hours ago

      the only problem with onlyoffice is that it’s electron.

      • FenrirIII
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        64 hours ago

        Are you positive?

      • dnzm
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        6 hours ago

        Ehh, I’m fairly sure it’s not. It certainly wasn’t in the past. When do you believe that changed?

        Never mind, you were talking about OO, not LO, my bad.

    • @someguy3
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      58 hours ago

      Onlyoffice is apparently Russian, headquartered in Latvia.

        • @someguy3
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          106 hours ago

          JFC it can be russian owned and russian controlled and russian employed and pay russian taxes while “headquartered” in Latvia.

        • @[email protected]
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          36 hours ago

          Latvia is not Russia

          Yet.

          And if you look on a Russian map, I’m sure it’s there already.

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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      210 hours ago

      I need to try onlyoffice again. The last time I tried, was the original beta, and it was faulty (being a first release beta, and all)

      • object [Object]
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        39 hours ago

        Oh onlyoffice works great! It’s spreadsheet function is far less buggy than excel and it’s smooth and snappy.

        • @[email protected]
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          48 hours ago

          OnlyOffice spreadsheet has less functionality than Excel but unless you are a super power user then it’s not a problem.

        • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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          59 hours ago

          Sweet! I’ve been using MS at work (required) and Libre at home (because screw MS). I’ll give Only another go!

  • @someguy3
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    88 hours ago

    Make it too expensive and people will switch to Google docs.

      • @someguy3
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        16 hours ago

        The point is it’s free.

    • @shalafi
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      78 hours ago

      Excel is the deal breaker on that. My last company was all Google products and auth, but I still had to buy Excel for the accounting and HR teams.

      • @someguy3
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        5 hours ago

        Um excel certainly has its places, but accounting? Don’t they have actual dedicated software for accounting? HR? Like payroll? Again don’t they have actual software for that?

        And I was thinking personal use, whose costs were posted. $100 a year, fuck that.

        • @UnderpantsWeevil
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          66 hours ago

          It’s hard to believe, but I work at a Fortune 100 company that’s still heavily reliant on Excel.

          Sure, we have specific software as System of Record (Oracle suite, mainly). But for all the day to day estimating and calculating and reporting and other noodling, people routinely export to Excel and play with numbers from there.

          • @someguy3
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            The point is you can use google docs or Libreoffice for day to day mundane things.

            It’s only the huge power features that you need Excel for, maybe in engineering. For accounting when you get to that power feature point I’m surprised there isn’t dedicated software.

            • @toddestan
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              22 hours ago

              Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it’s not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.

              From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it’s clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn’t really need Excel… but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I’d probably switch to something else.

              • @someguy3
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                11 hour ago

                Like it’s a fun number cruncher, but for serious accounting that’s tied into point of sale, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc you really should be running something dedicated. That’s why there are all these software companies making bank when from the outside you can’t quite figure out what they do.

                Protip on excel, when you start a new sheet ctrl+a, ctrl+1, change to number.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 hours ago

          See you think that - but excel finds a way. We have what are lovingly called the “spreadsheets of doom” which accounting uses to manage all forecasts, and the bits that involve money flows. Did you know you can hook excel into Salesforce and pull all the sales records? A person who thinks her monitor is her computer (she has a Dell laptop) somehow found a way…

          • @someguy3
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            27 hours ago

            I remember my dad had a problem and asked if he had to take the monitor or the tower to the shop.

  • @[email protected]
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    1510 hours ago

    The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?

    • @HeyJoe
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      98 hours ago

      As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I’m sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.

      As for businesses that part stinks… once you get integrated with all the services offered, it’s going to take a lot to back out since it’s not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It’s awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn’t anticipate this then they didn’t do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.

    • @x00z
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      27 hours ago

      They need money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 hours ago

        money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.

        This decade for SURE! We promise!

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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      610 hours ago

      Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that’s updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.

    • @[email protected]
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      49 hours ago

      It is. Remember when they just made a new version every 3 years and you didn’t REALLY need to buy the latest one if you had the previous one?

      Well that didn’t make them enough money.

    • @shalafi
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      18 hours ago

      Excel has most businesses in a headlock. Can’t see why anyone else pays for M$. I have Office, but it’s a permanent license from my last job. When I upgrade, say bye bye.

  • @CatsGoMOW
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    109 hours ago

    Phew, this was a good reminder since I was meaning to cancel my subscription anyway. It was going to auto renew in 2 days. 😬

  • @flop_leash_973
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    36 hours ago

    Makes me glad I continue to use the free Google and MS Office options and keep my cloud storage with a service that is dedicated to just storage.

    Cuts down on all of the forced price increases due to the AI mess the MBAs need to justify the expense of.

  • @[email protected]
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    8914 hours ago

    I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.

    • @x00z
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      67 hours ago

      First thing I do with the Google Assistent on Android Phones is to tell it to disable itself. Cool thing is that it does.

      • Lemminary
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        14 minutes ago

        You can do that??

    • @[email protected]
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      3112 hours ago

      I really wonder what their long term plan is here.

      Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn’t add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.

      I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it’s almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?

      Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?

      • NutWrench
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        36 hours ago

        The AI hardware isn’t for us. It’s for Google and Microsoft, so they can steal your computer’s CPU time and hard drive space so they can build their own personal Skynets. (Same thing with CoPilot, which requires 50gigs of your hard drive space. You’re also paying for the privilege of being spied on, which is nice for them, I guess.)

      • @Jestzer
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        2210 hours ago

        To please the shareholders. Then, when AI is no longer deemed valuable and its tremendous costs sink in, they will remove it and layoff the teams that worked on it, to please the shareholders.

        • @Blum0108
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          1510 hours ago

          But they’ll keep the prices high

        • @[email protected]
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          09 hours ago

          That’s way too simplistic, as often.

          For the shareholders, having an investment of several billions turn into an unwanted add-on for a few dollars is not a good thing. It’s the opposite, almost like a fire sale.

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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        1310 hours ago

        It’s not for you. It’s for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).

        • @[email protected]
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          39 hours ago

          And then what? Also, that won’t be legal in the EU.

          I mean, you take billions of dollars to develop an AI to put into a product you already have, making it less competitive in the process to … develop a slightly better AI maybe?

          Where exactly is the return on investment here?

          • @[email protected]
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            12 hours ago

            Why would this not be legal in EU if the conditions of using the copilot are clearly stated in the agreement? GDPR etc is mostly just that: requirement for clear language + informed consent.

          • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘
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            9 hours ago

            I don’t disagree [with your comment (I absolutely disagree with what ms is doing)].

            However, like with all technology in the past, where the civilian market received the obsolete military technologies (think, internet, cellphones, gps, and wifi), the consumer facing LLM/AI capabilities are likely nowhere near what the bleeding edge is in the military sector. The consumer facing Copilot is a product to make it “legal enough” to harvest your data, and the EULA people agreed to without reading is the nail on the coffin in that defense. The end product has nothing to do with copilot, office, or even us civilians. We’re just the vehicle.

            [Edit in brackets]

    • @vaderaj
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      4314 hours ago

      The clippy we all deserved

  • @[email protected]
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    27 hours ago

    Damn, we really didn’t see that coming now did we? Can’t wait until Amazon pulls that trigger on AWS.