Here 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.
To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.
I think it's just that HN audiences is generally detached from the harsh reality of the "money people" who make these purchasing choices and are generally choosing the safe low friction option, that lets the business free to focus on product development and sales that are the core of business, rather than wasting resources on building and managing IT infra from FOSS scratch for the sake of avoiding $BIG_TECH.
If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product.
Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.
not believe it???? just click past button and its shows top 50 of HN upvoted thread for yesterday and its shows multiple of SaaS product or SaaS clothed OpenSource in some form or another
> 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.
> 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.
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
If doing it from scratch, if jumping off from an already established product - could work, along with name recognition.
If there was one that i would put that could go head to head and possibly pull it off would be Corel[1], their suite is pretty comprehensive along with their collaborative suite.
Althogh from their businesss model seems they are content to maintain a narrow market and possible still remember getting burned by MS in the early days.
Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
There aren’t the same thing.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
>Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
It would be a huge undertaking. You have to use tens of different software packages who weren't designed to work with each other, unlike MS offering. Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?
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?
As 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.
You 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.
And 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.
Distributed 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.
And setting up things like rsync to replace dropbox is also "fairly quick"!
The point isn't that but the fact that like a normal user, a normal business don't want to have to tinker with low level components to get the functionality they want. They desire to pay and get a working piece of infrastructure with low hassle (tho i get saying active directory being low hassle is weird).
Starting 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.
They 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?
Office 365 these days is SSO (Include Enterprise cloud apps in the bargain),Cloud Documents, Email, Teams(Telephony and Chat) . Word, Excel and Outlook, what outsiders think of as "office" client side apps, are just a gimme. Heck thats just in brief, most of my customers are in deeper than that. Throw in Cloud Compute, and VDI as experiences that are just that much easier using Azure and 365 than other providers.
Not to mention, the data guarantees around Copilot are super enterprise compatible. Its not that companies want copilot, its that they know if they don't provide a solution, users will desire path into something with dodgy data security. So they provide "The Best" in the IBM sense of protecting the business and their jobs, which is Copilot.
It takes a bit of doing but your end state is, user logs into PC, signs in SSO, they get all their apps (remote and local), their emails, their documents, their collab and neither they or you need to think about it.
Oh and to continue, theres the whole Purview suite which is purpose built to integrate into large business data security incidents. I know of MSPs who wont be seen without Exchanges litigation hold / related tools because they have been saved from prosecution. Defender has not just grown more tentacles its like 3 different complete octopi at this point. Defender for Endpoint is particularly difficult to get away from because it does so damn much in the way of logging and monitoring for very little standup cost.
If you sat down most large orgs and created a list of what they may need to replace if they were getting rid of Office365 + supporting/supported features you would probably find its a lot more work. They are everywhere. Theres a turnkey(ish) microsoft solution that grows out the side of 365s head for every big business problem.
Libre office can mostly replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint. But Office 365 or M365 (or whatever the brand name is today) is a huge suite of cloud collaboration and administration tools, including personal and corporate-level cloud storage, app delivery, integration with enterprise accounts and other corporate tools, email, and many other more niche/obscure things. At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.
But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.
The office you are talking about is not what it used to be a few decades ago. I am not into this world but what I know of it is like you are comparing a tool to the whole workshop. No, the tool does not replace the workshop, the tool is a very small part of the workshop.
There are alternatives but when you have bought into the full ecosystem of MS, it will take a lot of work to move.
(Full disclosure: I work with both Linux and Windows at a small company where Office means what you mean with office. They are all using libreoffice but call it office)
I 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.
Yeah, one may not use it but it's hard to ignore when Office apps suggest you save the document to the cloud as a default. I do avoid it and don't really need any collaboration but I understand that I'm minority. On my home workstation (which is mainly used for video editing) I have only local account so I don't get sucked into more MS services. But at this point you have to actively try to get around the default setup with online account and cloud apps, so it's indeed hard to ignore.
It’s akin to being in the AWS ecosystem and having to switch to Oracle. It’s less so MS Office but rather the SAAS and enterprise security stuff in 365
Yeah, 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.
Don'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)
My 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.
Things can be done in such ways that there is nothing visibly incompatible (ie scripting behind some forms), you can always just print and fill the document if needed, and anyway most documents are static pdfs with optional plus for filling some fields in computer.
I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally.
Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
> It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck.
Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.
> not economical viable
I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
>Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.
I was working at a particular organisation 13 years ago, and we were tired. Everything was a half completed project. Everything needed work. One of the file servers was busted. We had cobbled together enough to make the customer experience ok, but the guts were on the deck.
The organisation expanded, hired a new CTO, moved the old Pseudo CTO to an architect role. New CTO sat down with everyone in the team for a 1 on 1 chat.
He asked what the biggest issue was, I said we needed time to fix everything and make it work. He said everyone on the team told him the same thing. That we have a solid environment and it just needs to be completed.
Next day he announces a shift to the cloud. We had all our priorities suspended as we forced 365 and Azure into everything. I bailed like 3 weeks later.
I just did a major refactor of a project to move it many versions up on a framework and whole process was effectively vibe coded. I'd estimate I did in a couple of days what would have taken a couple of weeks.
That's good and expect that could be shaved down even more. I was spending most of time just waiting for it do the work.
But I don't know if that fundamentally changes the situation or not. We've had steady improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.
Outside of any engineering issues there are a plethora of regulatory and compliance barriers. I think this is actually a much bigger issue than lack of developers.
On the surface level, building/compiling/running, maybe... But properly integrating with a given platform (or hell, version of platform!) is a whole new world of pain. :(
Google Workspace is the similar product. It does basically all the same stuff. Tons of companies use it instead.
It's just extremely complicated to transition between the two. So Google is more popular with newer companies, since it's a bit more seamless being cloud-native, whereas Microsoft has inertia with companies that have been around longer.
No one has developed a full alternative in one package. That's because some of the practices are really bad and shouldn't be solved the way the GP describes they are solved. Data stored in SharePoint, the worst MS tool ever maybe, is one example. O e wouldn't build another SharePoint, because why make something that sucks so much and then store data in it? It is moronic to do that.
And the GP is right in that the more moronic stuff people do, the harder it gets for them to no longer do that and somehow extract all their data into usable and useful form. Microsoft will happily go on making bad products, if that keeps its users prisoners.
An all in one? No, maybe Google Workspace. But for all those pieces you can get all that functionality from different vendors / open source projects.
I guess there's a strong opportunity for someone to build a Linux distro that bundles all of it for you in such a way you could use it OOTB for a company.
Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!”
Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.
The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint.
Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.
Your analogy is apt, but can be extended a bit further to show why MS is so successful.
Imagine organizing a meal out for 5 people. Easy. Despite the vegan, gluten free, kosher, high protein, lactose intolerant, no-fish, only fish, carb free dietary requirements there are lots of places to choose from. You can even order from 5 places and get 5 meals delivered.
Now do that for 50. Or 500. Or 50 000. Sooner or later you start going to buffets. Sooner or later the food becomes very bland.
You judge your software purchase for yourself based on features and moral principles and likely price.
Business doesn't really care about features. It does care about suppliers. It does care about the reliability of the supply chain. It doesn't care about price (at least not at the Windows / Office price point.)
I've been a supplier to corporates. The paperwork (and commitment) is substantial. Insurances, liabilities, support levels, release procedures, accountability,,,, it goes on for days.
The moat MS has, has nothing to do with software. Which is why that "better software" fails - because it is optimizing for one kind of "better" and business defines "better" another way.
And no, nothing is "replaced easily" in the enterprise space. When 10000 people, scattered over 1000 locations, get all-new software, nothing about that is easy.
> This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.
Is there? Maybe Google docs.
It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
The truth is, only a fraction of your users needs MS products so much that they will die on this hill. Legal, accounting, maybe procurement. That’s it. For everyone else Google Docs are actually better.
Google Sheets can do a lot, especially if you have automation tool like Zapier. Excel is no longer a moat or the moat. Powerpoint… jain. It’s cool, but Miro and Figma eat that cake nowadays.
A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember.
Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications.
It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.
As much as everyone complains about Microsoft Office the historic alternatives were all much worse and eventually all collapsed under their own weight.
Companies that had a successful niche, like Lotus, failed to keep up.
It is perfectly possible to run a company with at least 1k employees on non-MS stack, throwing a bone of Office apps to (small) legal and accounting teams, so that they approve the budget. I did that before.
You're not kidding! I did a deep dive into this a few months ago, and the alternative situation was dismal! LibreOffice is the closest, but its performance has room for improvement.
Exactly - that's what I was trying point out in my original comment. The desktop office apps are actually reasonably easy to swap out for a large portion of people. It's the rest of the M365 suite which is massive.
and, its so cheap. there are alternatives for individual components, but nothing that comes close to being this low cost. And, the ultimate value is that if you buy a niche tool (like notion) then only people with licenses can use it. Everybody at the company has office, so it's easy to share/collaborate. You have to really commit to avoiding office at all if you're going to replace parts of it.
I suspect my country is the same. I expect most countries are the same.
Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?
Russia is definitely not the same. I suspect they are still largely using (pirated) Microsoft products but cloud services hosted abroad are a big no-no.
Reverse argument is true as well..
If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.
All software is vulnerable, so what you're saying is not true. The only reason the products you listed seem more vulnerable is because they are focused by malicious actors due to their popularity and hence, also more often in the news.
No, I think you’ll find certain legacy corporations have terrible codebases and very little incentive to fix it, because why fix what makes money and has no liability?
Europe has just started making a few inroads in a few places. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question. This is basically 1% of what would need to be done to be secure against state mandated compromise of Microsoft.
Is it? The whole thing about replacing MS with OpenOffice and the LibreOffice or etc. has been going on for decades in Europe. Usually it’s just talk or a few municipalities that try it and then silently revert back to MS soon after.
Are we really? As much as I want to believe this and as much as some people want this, is is not yet the case AFAIK. Some govts. had some success recently though, like Schlesswig-Holstein.
The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)
Well Europe had better hope this is true, because we are heading to a future where US SaaS products should be treated with at least the same level of suspicion as those Israeli fleet management apps that keep turning up on Samsung Android devices.
At the moment you can more or less, I suppose, trust that Microsoft, Google and Apple are not actively spying for the newly anti-European goals of a protofascist federal government, but I am not sure that trust should be extended to cloud service providers more generally, let alone social media companies.
Europe has maybe two years to find a new level of technology independence and it cannot wait.
Trump's government has made it text, not just subtext, that they intend to interfere with further European integration (which is also — coincidentally or not — Russia's top foreign policy goal).
The EU should assume that this is a declaration of cold war and act accordingly:
"it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible."
.. until it doesn't.
There is a very good reason why switching away from M365 is almost impossible.
There is a very good reason why Microsoft offers free consultancy for a while if you just keep using M365.
Microsoft has made the world dependent on them. They are one of the biggest corporations that use drug lord tactics to keep its users.
The European Union sees it and is trying to fight it with all its might. Which is very very difficult when you're fighting a company that has more power than certain governments. It's like fighting the drug lord while still purchasing opiods from him.
Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. It's a huge logistical challenge, not because of anything Microsoft does, but just because they're different systems and migrating data and processes is inherently hard.
This is why I’m surprised by headlines like this”nobody wants to by Microsoft’s AI” like, every corporate M365 user must be either considering it or already started the purchasing process.
OK, supposed Claude in X many years could write a drop in replacement for every single one of those things. Would you raise your rates in the meantime too?
They 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.
> They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026.
You have my sympathy. I was also a frequent MS Publisher user, and I always felt that not many people knew about it. It's a useful, simple DTP package suitable for many less complex page layout scenarios. After the End-of-Support announcement, I switched to the LibreOffice Draw already. Fortunately, LibreOffice Draw works quite nicely as a Publisher replacement for me. There is also Scribus [1].
The worst part about MS Office isn't the direct user experience, because I can usually choose to use other software. The worst part is that I and everybody else are subjected to the documents that Office produces. Their defaults and their UX inevitably produce stuff that is hard to read and inconsistent, unless you fight the software really hard and make sacrifices with your desired output. And there's no escape from it. Another specimen of Word's 2.5 cm margins, 200-character lines in poorly designed knockoff Helvetica will probably find its way to my mailbox before the end of the day.
A lot of this seems to be related to death of the amateur and semi-pro DTP industries:
1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions).
2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc.
I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death).
No-one will pay for it, but the presence of Publisher, as a tool that people know and use, in the Office Suite, would probably be a substantial feature for many people.
Which is funny because here in Seattle there is starting to be a resurgence of DTP to some degree. But it's very underground and, being already in a tech hub, likely very niche from a macroeconomics viewpoint.
> 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.
I'm pretty sure they not only show up with a PowerPoint file, but one with missing/nonembedded fonts, web images, perhaps even a video in there somewhere. At least that's been my experience with people sending me stuff to print.
When I did IT work for my university, I was in charge of a big plotter printer that the science students used to print posters with summaries of their research for conferences. The only format I ever got was PowerPoint. Based on the number of search results for "powerpoint research poster template", it looks like this PowerPoint is still the format of choice.
I never really thought about it, but it is kind of odd that the same community that loves using LaTeX for document formatting and typesetting research papers is also using PowerPoint as a desktop publishing substitute.
They probably meant Publisher, which was a part of every more expensive MS Office deal. It was simple to use and much more suitable than Word for simple design jobs (business cards, leaflets, stationary, etc) and with which the "average" MS Office user could now do what was once the domain of DTP "professionals".
Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that?
The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there.
I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too.
It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?
I'm going to imagine anyone who needs to make fold-out leaflets is going to end up either doing it in Creative Cloud (i.e. InDesign), or these days, will just do it in Figma or Canva.
Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).
PowerPoint is probably the replacement because it doesn't restrict where things can be placed (at least not by default). Word would be much more suitable, if only they made and advertised some sort of DTP mode that would do away with the image position defaults and let users put things over margins.
Do you mean changed the default text box / picture / drawing canvas mode from "in line" to "in front of text" (which lets you put it anywhere, including over margins)? You actually can do that in advanced options. "DTP mode" sounds like marketing overkill for a simple option but maybe it would help.
Pretty much. The pattern I'm noticing is users see that drawing in Word is cumbersome (layout features "get in the way") while in PowerPoint they can put things all over the place, so they naturally gravitate towards PowerPoint when they feel they don't need a classic letter layout but rather an "empty canvas" they can do whatever with.
It can all be done in Word too, but most people I've seen using Word don't bother even setting image placement for each image or change margins. They just stick with what's default.
I actually agree with you that a whole mode is an overkill, but I think whatever they put in they'd have to market pretty well so users would consider it at all. So it also makes sense to me they'd say "use PowerPoint instead" as it is what many are already doing.
You need more than a template if you're going to make a booklet by folding a piece of paper in 4 - half of the "pages" (quarter pages) need to be upside down.
In truth, I haven't tried this in Word either, although it appears to be possible in page setup. Maybe I just stopped using Publisher when I started getting duplex printers. Or even stopped needing silly layouts for school projects.
I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".
Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.
What's crazier is that it actually stops working if installed.
Of the last two times I had to make a flyer, one of the two I pulled up PowerPoint to accomplish. It's not a completely outlandish direction. They should add a Publisher mode that transforms the interface for print document design.
Not to worry. Once they unleash those AI enhanced vibe programmers that are doing %33 more programming on this problem all will be good. The AI is already helping them to become more profitable by making it necessary to charge more for their product. The sky's the limit. Or Skynet's the limit;)
Weird 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.
This one caught me by surprise. Publisher is a really great tool to create internal documents…reminds me of the Adobe Fireworks fiasco. They force you to use a tool of which you only need 5% and pay an increase cost (time and subscription) 500%.
I mean, Powerpoint, really? That app should’ve been gone a long time.
I was thinking the same thing about people seemingly not knowing about Publisher.
And I always found those memes about photos moving around your text annoying, because that it literally what you want when making a document (you know, what Word is designed for) (but you can just change the behaviour if you want a different layout anyway).
I used Scribus. Top choice for replacing Publisher by open source software. Scribus is very intuitive and with enough time I could churn out a beautiful looking effective resume on my first try
I 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.
Is 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...
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.
XLOOKUP is so nice though.
The other stuff I can live without, especially the UI on data connections changing all the time and the connections breaking anyway.
Word 97 was basically feature complete though (if buggy - the same bugs persist today of course), including track changes and compare/merge documents. The killer feature now is being able to work on the same document with multiple people and seeing their changes in realtime. You used to be able to do this on-prem but that product (Office Online Server) got killed. I wonder why.
FWIW, both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice support XLOOKUP. In fact LibreOffice has over 500 Excel formulae, which is very close to the number of formulae Excel has.
Unless you use a lot of VBA (and you can't translate it to Python), or you've got some proprietary COM addin that you can't live without, LibreOffice's Calc is a pretty damn good replacement for Excel for the majority of users.
They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year.
Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again.
I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".
I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).
I didn't really want to resort to piracy; I think it's stupid that Adobe won't sell a perpetual license.
I got a license to Moho from a Humble Bundle like a year ago, and I think Toonz is open source nowadays, all in addition to the ToonBoom copy I have so I probably don't need the real Adobe Animate anymore.
The pace has probably slowed down, but problem isn't so much that they're not adding anything, it's that the additions are either somewhat niche (e.g., new Excel formulas), don't work as well as they should (e.g., syncing), or are confusing (e.g., the new Outlook that lives alongside "classic" Outlook).
Can confirm as someone who was using pre-subscription Office to write/read files while everyone else at work was using the 365 version. Now that I'm using 365 too, I do however appreciate the ability to do shared live editing in the office programs.
I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.
I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.
People no longer really look at a product and ask if it does what they need, they just compare it to the previous product and ask if the newer product has 'more.' More is ALWAYS better, and there's no reason to think past this stage.
In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete.
Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.
> Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98.
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.
I 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.
I 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.
It's not exactly the same, but I definitely remember Microsoft releasing some kind of conversion tool around the start of Office 2007's life that could convert the newer XML based files into the older '03 compatible files. Or maybe it was the other way around... No idea if that tools still kicking around somewhere.
Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.
This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
This 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
Business basic goes from $6 to $7. Business premium is unchanged from $22 to $22.
Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.
> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
> Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
There's no substance to this comment. It's pure speculation. If you actually want to look at evidence, look at the recent news that Microsoft has cut AI sales targets in half.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
It’s not ironic at all. Posting here was deliberate to highlight the bubble that happens here for consumer products. This comment section has a lot of people evaluating these price hikes as if they were targeted at HN individual users, not for a product targeted at a different audiences and corporate subscriptions.
Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market.
Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
As for AI demand: If you don’t think AI is in demand, you haven’t been looking at the explosive adoption of AI tools from ChatGPT to Sora (consistently high on app charts) by consumers. These products are in high demand, though you’d never know if it your only perspective was through upvoted HN stories and comments.
> Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, we can be out of touch a lot of the time, but I kind of hate that this has become the "smoking gun" to dismiss comments on Hacker News. Yes, one person was wrong about Dropbox and said that they could just use an FTP server. Yes, people on here agreed with that person. Yes, sometimes our ability to do things low level blinds us to the fact that the majority of people can't or simply don't want to.
That said, most of the negative feedback people get for these things is actually good feedback, and most of the time when people say a project can be accomplished by doing XYZ, that's usually a valid point. Technical people can absolutely be out of touch (and I'm probably worse than average about it), but that doesn't automatically mean that a comment on HN is invalid or useless.
While saying "no one wants" the AI features might be a bit of hyperbole, I don't think it's super out of touch, and this is evidenced by the fact that a lot of the VC money for AI ventures is drying up. AI is neat and here to stay, but I think a large chunk of society is coming to terms with the fact that it's not nearly as cool as it was promised to us, and getting a little annoyed with how much AI crap is being thrown at us. YouTube is getting filled with low-effort AI video and AI voice and AI script bullshit, the average web page is turning a tinge of yellow from all the AI generated images that seem to be all over the place, searching is getting almost as bad as it was in 2005 when "SEO" became a thing because of all the AI generated blogs designed to steal clicks. None of this stuff is relegated to the technical crowd, this is stuff even normies have to deal with.
And within the scope of HN, I'm sure all of us are getting a little tired of having to review pull requests with huge chunks of clearly-AI-generated code that the writer doesn't really and are large enough to not be realistically reviewable with a lot of shitty, low-effort code.
I broadly agree with you but the AI demand part is more nuanced. Demand is very large for consumer-ish apps like ChatGPT and Sora, but even Claude, which is huge for coding and arguably the best model right now, is tiny. I've had an interaction with someone nontechnical who, after seeing the Claude logo bounce, asked me why my ChatGPT had fireworks.
Yeah, the demand is there, but I have a hard time believing nontechnical people are clamoring for Copilot, they likely don't even know such a thing exists. The market is insane right now.
> but even Claude, which is huge for coding and arguably the best model right now, is tiny. I've had an interaction with someone nontechnical who, after seeing the Claude logo bounce, asked me why my ChatGPT had fireworks
So they had used ChatGPT enough to recognize that you were using a different tool?
I don’t see this as contradicting anything. Even the nontechnical people in your life are familiar with these tools because they’re using them.
When was the last price hike? Looking at historical inflation and working backwards, you only need to start at around late 2021 to get 16% cumulative inflation. In other words if they didn't raise their prices for 4 years, they'd be at par with inflation.
>Since when does any organization factor in inflation for renewals from vendors?!
Don't ask me, ask the person who posed the question of inflation in the first place. That said...
>All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way. Inflation affects everything in the economy, so a company that doesn't raise prices in line with it is losing money. Even SaaS businesses with low marginal costs aren't exempt, because they still need to pay salaries for developers and support staff, both of which roughly track inflation. Therefore if business see price hikes that raise with inflation, they can assume that competitors will raise prices as well, and it's not going to be worth switching unless they're already on the fence for some other reason.
Percentages are fun because they can make something with a small absolute change look like a giant change.
No business is really going to care about $1.00/user, especially when it costs hundreds of dollars per user (or thousands) to migrate entirely away from the Microsoft ecosystem.
How much inflation has there been since the last price increase? From 2022 to 2025 it look likes like about 11%, so not all that different if you're trying to keep a round number.
The average australian customer managed to get angry enough that the ACCC is working to force a slop free variant and a refund for everyone dark patterned into upgrading.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
You're completely right about this. But how does the Venn diagram look for features between different Office versions and for customer needs? Another commenter here said that Office 98 is good enough for most users, and I have to agree.
What reason is there today for somebody to upgrade from a 10 or 15 year old version of Office? Is Copilot it?
I've managed a very information-intensive career so far without using MS Office. Apple's iWork software is perfectly fine. And I'm not avoiding Office out of any principle. If I needed or wanted it, I'd be happy to pay for it.
People here do seem to miss that they added this relatively big feature. The problem for Microsoft is that Google Docs also has collaborative editing, and in my experience, it actually works better.
For end-users maybe, but for the business' IT who get a working mail server they don't have to mess with, and a whole remote work and videoconferencing package that "just works" and most people already know how to use, it's a hell of a deal.
Kind of hard to understand what it does that Google Workspace + Zoom (or any other provider) doesn't?
I'm seeing a very common pattern of Google Workspace + Google Meet, Zoom seats for people who need to remotely control computers, and then Slack or ones of its competitors for chat.
- Its one package
- All the non-tech users already know Microsoft
- Most IT techies will be VERY familiar with Microsoft
- If you are migrating from on-Prem then it is highly likely you've got Exchange on-prem.
Add on top of that, you can (depending on package) get Active Directory ("Entra") and MDM ("Intune"). So you get credential management and the ability to push out Group Policies to your user's machines.
Look, I'm the last person to defend Microsoft. But if you are a Microsoft shop then it does, sadly, make a lot of sense to take a Microsoft sub.
Teams has annoyingly some lock in value for 365. Nobody should prefer Exchange Online over Exchange though, Microsoft is too unreliable of a service provider.
The great unwashed masses will still continue to pay it. It's not a sizeable increases that they'd be willing to move elsewhere. People rationalize it in the context of it's only a buck a month and other things increase by more. M$ are not stupid but do know what they're doing. May take is. Don't do drugs. Don't do subscriptions. Don't do MICROS~1.
In my experience, most people, especially execs who are negotiating the licensing deals, want Copilot. Even if they are underwhelmed after using it, at that point, MS doesn't care. They already have your money.
> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing.
There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.
There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.
But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.
But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.
But where will the next generation be shifted to?
Launched to Europe after Canada?
Then launched into Space?
It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.
That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.
I didn't mean to imply Germany isn't independent and at the same time we can't trust our allies. It's mostly that the monster game puts risk downstream too. And some have it really bad if you're going for citizenship. I know, it seems like it's just a fucking Office Suite.
I wish I could agree with this, but the ecosystem lock-in is too great. They might lose business for sure but it may not put a dent in their revenue at all.
If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smaller orgs it might be easier, but those don't pay Microsoft as much anyways.
From a user point of view, there are tools that have similar features, some even better features. G-suite is the only platform i know of that unifies all the office productivity products like 365 does. But neither G-suite nor any other platform can be managed/policed as well as 365. At the end of the day, will Google behave any better than Microsoft anyways (cost or otherwise)? And it isn't just policing and management but securing all that precious data in there, Microsoft might not be great but lots of tech-debt has gone into securing it within that platform. A migration would be costly, justifying it with cost savings alone might be difficult.
It's not at all about being "resistant to change". OneDrive has been around long enough that it doesn't really count as "change" anymore.
There are downsides to OneDrive. Topping the list is the risk of data loss. Every dev here has at least one story of OneDrive getting confused in a way that led to data loss (that's usually what got them to start avoiding using it). It can also be inconvenient and get in the way in more minor ways, such as causing path confusion with some applications.
The benefits, at least where I work, are pretty minimal. So, on the whole, people tend to keep their documents in unsynced folders. The only people I've talked to here that have anything positive to say about it are managers.
in corporate america, it's everywhere, to the point where people's compromised accounts being used to send phishing content via sharepoint/onedrive is extremely common. It is (rightfully) highly encouraged as well due to their built-in data loss prevention stuff (Microsoft information protection/MIP), it's the only reasonable way I've seen to get a handle on secret documents/content/slides from leaking too much.
Most of their enterprise clients get bundled services so it often still retains its competitive edge. Their Power suite, Teams and the existing integrations make it cost effective even with the increases.
Zoho is crap. Sure, on the tin it comes with 64 different things, but many are poorly integrated and feature set is just enough to be like "Yes, we have that feature."
Interesting. I know I'm not a very demanding user of word processing or presentation software. But I've been using zoho for basic business stuff for one of my businesses since 2019, and I wouldn't call it crap. It's not amazing, but I pay something like $12/user/year. And I get shared docs/sheets/decks + pretty decent email. And their transactional email service (zeptomail) is actually top notch IMO.
What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?
I am a home user, but I use Zoho's paid email service as a backup and alternative to Gmail and Outlook, and it is pretty decent and extremely affordable.
Probably been about 2 years since I was forced to last use it but with amount of slop being added, their development priorities would have to massively changed.
Libre Office Calc is pretty similar to Excel for general use. For importing csv files it has always been superior to Excel. Some niche areas in Calc are also better than Excel. Inflexible users are locked into Excel, but for general purpose use Calc is all you need.
Libre Office is great for replicating what Excel did 10 years ago. Excel has a lot of things that power users use (like Power Query) that Libre Office simply isn't even trying to replicate.
When developers tell me that I could use Calc rather than Excel, I ask them if they would be OK being forced to use Emacs or Vim, whichever is the opposite of what they spent the last decade perfecting.
For legacy spreadsheets, you're 100% correct. I'll need to keep a version of Excel around forever. If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want, a perpetual license to Office 2019 runs about $20 and will do that job for me.
For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
> If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want [...]
In case you aren't aware, when they try to sneak Copilot onto your plan you can get rid of it by going to your plan management page and canceling. One of the offers they should offer to try to get you to stay is your old plan without Copilot.
That depends on your workload. I've been using Excel since 1993, and I find the things I've listed help me get things done just as well as Excel does, unless I have a pile of macros and vbscript I need to interop with.
This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.
The solution is actually just not using Excel. If you're essentially using Excel as a LOB backend and database, that should probably not be in Excel.
It's fine if you have a few formulas. As soon as you're busting out macros it's time to sunset the workbook and make an application. There's a lot of God Excel workbooks sitting around on share drives with no audibility or quality control.
Yes, there's many many cases that should likely not be using Excel.
But given that Excel is the second-best tool for everything, world runs on it.
And when you try to build systems to replace Excel for a specific task, you quickly learn how extremely powerful Excel is and how hard is to replace it and add value that customers would care about.
I've been there, the problem is that replacements are not as versatile or "floppy". But that's also a good thing, because Excel is too versatile to the point where most workbooks are filled with bugs on top of bugs and nobody cares.
Yes, bugs in sheets are worst part of excel, by far.
But many end users prefer dealing with bugs than with inflexible software that doesn’t understand all the different ways how real world is messy and hard to model.
I hate using Excel. But I 100% understand why world runs on it.
Have to disagree. It depends on what you are doing. That the alternatives can be replacements, including the open source ones, is relative and should be looked at as a percentage.
If you listed out all the things that Excel can do, we might find that the alternative is at 80% or so (just a number), with some additional things that Excel can't do. That 80% could be good enough to switch. It should not be looked at as "all or nothing", especially for every person or business.
I want to love these, mostly because they're FOSS and Office/Google Spreadsheets seems to get more and more bloated, and subsequently slower.
But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
Many would say that the FOSS alternatives don't copy Office enough. Often, by going there own way with various tasks, they create a bigger jump. Case in point, the Linux distros that attract the most attention for common folk and not niche use, are the ones that are more Windows-like. Examples: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, etc... The smaller the jump, the more you can convince people to switch over.
When there is a significant difference, it needs to be shown what the equivalent is in the alternative. The jump can be a bit mitigated by education or information, but usually by only so much, where it's still seen as attractive.
I think the main issue for most people is that the layout is slightly different, probably to help prevent microsoft from suing them.
But once you get used to those differences, (also, knowing that there are a handful of themes that can shorten the difference significantly) then it becomes a non-issue after less than 10 hours of use.
LibreOffice seems to have an optional ribbon-like interface for the people that happen to like it (View -> User Interface) (but I don't use this UI mode as I personally find ribbon-like UIs hard to work with).
> But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
Speak for yourself. I see that LibreOffice's default UI is still a normal WIMP UI and this is a plus for me. I hated when MS Office switched to the ribbon in Office 2007.
"So you want to insert a row in a table? Great, just click on Table > Insert > Row... Oh well. Nevermind, just show me your screen and I'll hunt the functionality in that stupid ribbon."
We don't need less, but more, Office programs that respect GUI UI conventions.
Yeah, that's the opposite of what I want, then I'll just continue using Excel... What I want is for someone to figure out a better UI and better UX, not just copy what's out there.
My hot take on a better excel: the two things excel sucks at: version control and syncing. On the backend, separate the data and the logic in the spreadsheet and put each into version control. Then use something like syncthing to share documents with colleagues. You might also need something like bitmessage for initial handshake. Now you have a spreadsheet you can collaborate on in real time over the Internet or LAN without screwing around with a server, a google account, a credit card etc.
There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.
I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...
Yes, but take OpenOffice off the list, development has slowed to a glacial pace and it’s close to abandoned in favour of LibreOffice, which is actively maintained.
Looks like there was finally a OpenOffice release recently but that was after years of people complaining of security vulnerabilities not fixed in the release version.
My 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.
I think the only way to get the no-Copilot version now is to already have the Copilot version and try to cancel your subscription, and only then they'll offer the "Classic" version sans Copilot as a last ditch retention effort. If users actually wanted this stuff they wouldn't need to bury the option to not pay for it.
If 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.
I'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.
If 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.
I think a surprising number of companies only survive because Microsoft Office gets around hostile internal IT departments and gives workers capabilities they can’t otherwise get on their locked down workstations.
It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.
Bullshit. Just from a document editing perspective, going back to a network share where only one person can edit a doc is not going to fly. I used to have to deal with this as IT/desktop support and it fucking sucked. Docs in the cloud give you better collab capabilities and remove the need to have fancy networking, VPNs, international security exclusion groups etc, domain controller bullshit, connecting all of the companies offices together. Connect to the Internet, and all your stuff is there no matter where you are. It sounds like you've never had to support the infra for office workers before. This is way better than it used to be. For a small company, sure, do whatever. But the bigger it gets, the harder all that shit becomes and requires a lot of work to keep it running.
> If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted.
But what about the impact of increased productivity when not having to deal with the garbage that are New Teams and New Outlook? The employees would start doing more in lesser time and the companies could potentially make more profits too. Why would they want that if they could just be locked in with Microsoft month-on-month? /s
Ah yes security, the ultimate shakedown mechanic. Tony Soprano should've been in software sales. "You don't want anything happen to your nice little business do you??"
Wow, 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).
We 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.)
I 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.
Is 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.)
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.
For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.
I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Document Foundation so that it can get better, but it moves very slowly.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics.
This might be true. But most Excel users just use the basics and would be well served to switching to a Free Software alternative such as LibreOffice Calc. Which, is also capable to be used in advanced contexts; although for those cases it is different than Excel, admittedly.
I think most of the excuses saying why people don't switch to Excel alternatives are simply coverups for inertia. I understand that; getting out of the comfort zone is difficult. But it's not impossible.
Calc has many features focused on correctness and reliability. Excel is a joke on both of those accounts.
Turns out close to 100% of the spreadsheet users out there don't care about that. It's unnerving and absurd, and IMO, what is even the point of all the effort of entering your data and working it if you don't care about the result being correct? But that's how the world is.
I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.
LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.
Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.
Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.
And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.
For 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.
Power Query + Power Pivot + M. I don't use formulas in cells. The sheets are just a canvas for Pivot Tables, final tables, and charts connected to the data from Power Query and Pivot.
I deal with hundreds of API integrations involving various JSON, CSV, TSV, and XML files with mixed validity. My workflow: Notepad++ for a visual check -> Prototype everything in Excel. I give users a "visual", connect it to real data, and only then migrate the final logic to BI dashboards or databases.
Nothing else delivers results this fast. SQL, BI tools, and Python are too slow because they generally need "clean" data. Cleaning and validation take too much time there. In Excel, it's mostly just a few clicks.
PS: I spent 2 years (2022-2023) using LibreOffice Calc. I didn't touch Excel once, thinking I needed to break the habit. In the end, I did break the habit, but it was replaced by a pile of scripts and utilities because Calc couldn't do what I needed (or do it fast enough). The experience reminds me of testing Krita for 2 years (2018-2020) — I eventually returned to Adobe Photoshop (but that's another story).
PS2: About (Query + Pivot + BI). This allows you to process millions of rows (bypassing grid limitations). It also allows you to compress everything into an OLAP cube, taking up little space and working quickly with data.
Interesting. I'm not experienced in data cleaning.
About Python vs Excel:
Isn't manual cleanning of data in Excel prone to permanent error? Because:
- it's hard to version control/diff
- it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells
- it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git
In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess.
>When Visicalc was released, Perez became convinced that it was the ideal user interface for his visionary product: the Functional Database. With his friend Jose Sinai formed the Sinper Corporation in early 1983 and released his initial product, TM/1 (the "TM" in TM1 stands for "Table Manager"). Sinper was purchased by Applix in 1996, which was purchased by Cognos in late 2007, which was in itself acquired mere months later by IBM.[3][2]
TM1 is widely used as a way to interface with official ledgers.
Yup, I have. And had to deal with converting "this awesome tool that does X, Y and Z" to an actual multi-user app because it was just so great. You end up discovering that there are tons of miscalculations in these formulas that only surface when you start writing tests for them, and that a lot of the business decisions based on these tools had flawed assumptions.
Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
My first job out of uni was developing a devops pipeline for Excel spreadsheets after one went rogue and cost the broker trader I was hired by $10m in one fun afternoon.
An application I consulted on was a web interface that made heavy use of the Excel portions of Microsoft Graph so that the finance team could continue to send clients spreadsheets that they could adjust without also sending them the formulas to "steal" (and take other parts of their business elsewhere, to noticeable millions of dollars of project spending habit shifts). The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"), so it was wildly custom solution to figure out where formulas existed in any of the spreadsheets finance felt like giving to the app, build a custom UI for entering the inputs to those formulas, run those formulas most with Microsoft Graph cloud magic/some with other web libraries, and return the results.
If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
I would like to see the finance team that codes all their own C code and is adamant it needs to be in Emacs, especially because if they are that deep in Emacs I'd be wondering why they are insisting on C rather than Emacslisp or something even more esoteric like GNU Guile or someone's custom Forth to Fortran compiler…
But to answer the question, that is where I finished. We weren't "okay with it" that the finance team insisted on a C# to Excel files in SharePoint/OneDrive via Microsoft Graph turducken. We lived with it because the finance team had enough of the metaphorical keys to the car to be deeply in the driver's seat of that project. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and deliver what the customer wants.
I know a few people who use Quantrix for financial modelling. It is an exceptionally nice piece of software, basically the successor of Lotus Improv, with Improv's more robust and auditable separation of data and formulas.
I used Apple Numbers for all my spreadsheeting so it depends what you mean by "serious financial work". The vast majority of folk could probably get by without using Excel I am guessing.
For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.
While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version.
You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
Sharepoint and office is the modern version of cancer. Nobody wants to manage onprem AD and mapped drives because cLoUd is the solution. Doesn't help that Microsoft stopped caring about onprem.
I 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!
Excel has no competition whatsoever in the local software space. Google Sheets is somewhat useful for 80% of users but for people who must be on-prem/local it’s Excel or nothing.
Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?
In practice, it's like how having Adobe Reader used to be. You mostly don't need it, but occasionally you need it for interoperability with other people, such as lawyers.
Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.
Considering 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
A 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.
5% 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".
At 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.
It's more a ton of inertia than some sort of monopoly. A lot of new companies immediately start on an alternative these days. They don't see a reason to pay the higher price.
I agree that it's a lot of work to build something that can render and edit their complex format, but quite a few companies have managed now.
> 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.
I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files.
Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite well. Sure, Microsoft has a little bit of a leg up, but it's nothing like the monopoly they had on .doc.
Today, we expect programs to be able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. In the 90s, we truly didn't. Yes, there might be some advanced things that don't always work, but it's so different today.
I got a bad grade in a highschool English class because the teacher didn't like the doc file generated by StarOffice. My dad came round the school raising hell and got her to grade the paper on contents, saying if they wanted me to have office they could buy a copy of it. I got an A- after that
> 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.
The 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?
In 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.
Yeah, 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.
Yes, 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.
> 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)
That business model exists and appears here periodically complaining about how unfair Microsoft is. We don't care, we'll meet Microsoft where they are and just offer their customers a more specific solution.
Then make this specific solution open source, and make the laywers pay for support and roadmap decisions / features they require! Make them pay for integrations with Azure AD and struff like this! Make them pay for the binary! The possibilities are endless, it can work!
You can aim for better than "where MS is".
This could constitute a killer argument to make your solution appealing.
The 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.
My 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.
>" One interpretation is that the extra $10 billion from the price increases will offset some of the red ink Microsoft is bleeding because of the investments they’re making in datacenter capacity, hardware, and software needed to make Copilot useful"
Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.
Amazon ($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 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.
I 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
One 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.
To 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)
They 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.
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.
I 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.
Yes, 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?
On the contrary, I don't think end-user market forces are having any significant effect at all. There's currently boundless slack on that side as far as Microsoft is concerned. The only thing effecting the prices are the upcoming quarterly financials. "Line goes up" is the only economic law at play here. Their hopelessly trapped customers should consider themselves lucky a steeper deflection wasn't in order.
Have you stopped and thought about what you're saying or are you just assuming this is expensive because it's Microsoft and they're Bad?
Let's actually look at what you get for your money (I'll just go by current consumer pricing since it's easy to find/understand):
Microsoft 365 Family:
$130/year
6 people, 1TB storage per person
Each person gets 5 devices for all Office apps
Higher AI usage limits than free (only primary user, not shared)
Let's try to buy this from someone else:
Google: $99/year for 2TB, shared between 6 people, but your limit is 2TB total. No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI which bumps this all up to $20/month with no additional storage. I can't actually see how much additional storage costs to make this equivalent to 1TB/person without signing up.
Apple: $420/year to get 6TB of storage shared between 6 people. iWork apps are garbage, no AI included. iCloud+ does have some side features like private relay, custom domain email, etc.
Proton Family: 3TB, $288 a year
pCloud: 10TB family lifetime plan is $1500, equivalent to about 10 years of paying for Office 365.
All this to say, tl;dr, Microsoft is actually offering one of the better deals out there especially if you want to give a significant amount of storage to each family member at a low cost.
> No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI
Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)
Interesting, Google’s price comparison made it look like free tiers didn’t get that.
I did try to use annual pricing with annual discounts wherever I could, some services don’t really list it explicitly.
I will admit Microsoft’s pricing doesn’t really look as good if you’re not sharing the storage, and they get demerit for not providing a free tier for most of the apps at all.
LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.
Shouldn'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.
I 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.
As 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...]
I'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.
They 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.
Weird 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.
I 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.
I 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).
Haven'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.
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.
I 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. It includes various edibles too.
The 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.
Well, 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.
While 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?
LibreOffice 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.
It 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.
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).
I 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.
O365 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.
Heroic. 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.
Well 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.
Xbox 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,.
I 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.
Sorry, 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.
I 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?
You 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.
The 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).
DOCX 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.
This 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.
You 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
Here 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/mic...
And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...
To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.
We're back in the mainframe times boys, good luck everyone.
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I think it's just that HN audiences is generally detached from the harsh reality of the "money people" who make these purchasing choices and are generally choosing the safe low friction option, that lets the business free to focus on product development and sales that are the core of business, rather than wasting resources on building and managing IT infra from FOSS scratch for the sake of avoiding $BIG_TECH.
If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product.
Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.
I also didn't understand where sentiment of the same industry that promote SaaS for their niche tool comes from
like this is YC sponsored site, there is a tons of SaaS for niche toolkit that people sold,shares etc
and now all of sudden they hate it when other people doing the same thing they do
I'm not buying or selling a SaaS. I don't like them. HN has more than one user and they don't all agree.
Yeah but its your opinion, we talking about facts
not believe it???? just click past button and its shows top 50 of HN upvoted thread for yesterday and its shows multiple of SaaS product or SaaS clothed OpenSource in some form or another
> 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.
> 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.
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
If doing it from scratch, if jumping off from an already established product - could work, along with name recognition.
If there was one that i would put that could go head to head and possibly pull it off would be Corel[1], their suite is pretty comprehensive along with their collaborative suite.
Althogh from their businesss model seems they are content to maintain a narrow market and possible still remember getting burned by MS in the early days.
[1] https://www.corel.com/en/all-products/
In all fairness I think Notion and Google have made some level of headway for FWIW.
Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
> plenty of developer talent
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
There aren’t the same thing.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
>Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
It would be a huge undertaking. You have to use tens of different software packages who weren't designed to work with each other, unlike MS offering. Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office
500 million users. Just because you haven't heard it doesn't mean an alternative doesn't exist.
Issue is, the WPS office suite is more bloated with ads than even Microsoft's offerings are, and, overall, is quite a doozy to navigate.
If you want a true and good alternative, I'd recommend ONLYOFFICE[1].
[1] https://www.onlyoffice.com/
OpenOffice is no longer actively developed. It was replaced by LibreOffice quite awhile ago.
The comment links to OnlyOffice, which is a different app suite from OpenOffice.
It's not going to be a valid alternative in the west - certainly not something any government would even consider.
While there does not seem to be a maintained snap or flagpole package available, the company behind WPS Office releases DEBs and RPMs it seems: https://www.tech2geek.net/how-to-install-wps-office-on-linux...
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?
As 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.
You 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.
Large enterprises were doing this stuff with Unix and mainframes long before Microsoft figured out what preemptive multitasking was.
And 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.
Distributed 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.
ActiveDirectory is million times better than any other solution on the market.
You do you. Last time I needed it, setting up libpam-mysql was fairly quick.
And setting up things like rsync to replace dropbox is also "fairly quick"!
The point isn't that but the fact that like a normal user, a normal business don't want to have to tinker with low level components to get the functionality they want. They desire to pay and get a working piece of infrastructure with low hassle (tho i get saying active directory being low hassle is weird).
You are arguing the Oracle strategy, raise prices until it hurts, throw up roadblocks to switching and raise them some more.
Every now and then I forget why the common man hates our industry nowadays, but luckily this forum always reminds me
They're working on it.
Starting 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.
They 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?
Suggesting libreoffice as an alternative to Office 365 is crazy.
Why? 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.
Office 365 these days is SSO (Include Enterprise cloud apps in the bargain),Cloud Documents, Email, Teams(Telephony and Chat) . Word, Excel and Outlook, what outsiders think of as "office" client side apps, are just a gimme. Heck thats just in brief, most of my customers are in deeper than that. Throw in Cloud Compute, and VDI as experiences that are just that much easier using Azure and 365 than other providers.
Not to mention, the data guarantees around Copilot are super enterprise compatible. Its not that companies want copilot, its that they know if they don't provide a solution, users will desire path into something with dodgy data security. So they provide "The Best" in the IBM sense of protecting the business and their jobs, which is Copilot.
It takes a bit of doing but your end state is, user logs into PC, signs in SSO, they get all their apps (remote and local), their emails, their documents, their collab and neither they or you need to think about it.
Oh and to continue, theres the whole Purview suite which is purpose built to integrate into large business data security incidents. I know of MSPs who wont be seen without Exchanges litigation hold / related tools because they have been saved from prosecution. Defender has not just grown more tentacles its like 3 different complete octopi at this point. Defender for Endpoint is particularly difficult to get away from because it does so damn much in the way of logging and monitoring for very little standup cost.
If you sat down most large orgs and created a list of what they may need to replace if they were getting rid of Office365 + supporting/supported features you would probably find its a lot more work. They are everywhere. Theres a turnkey(ish) microsoft solution that grows out the side of 365s head for every big business problem.
Intune. Hello. Man it just keeps going on.
Libre office can mostly replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint. But Office 365 or M365 (or whatever the brand name is today) is a huge suite of cloud collaboration and administration tools, including personal and corporate-level cloud storage, app delivery, integration with enterprise accounts and other corporate tools, email, and many other more niche/obscure things. At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.
But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.
And what if that is actually useful ? I guess email ?
In enterprise? All of it.
The office you are talking about is not what it used to be a few decades ago. I am not into this world but what I know of it is like you are comparing a tool to the whole workshop. No, the tool does not replace the workshop, the tool is a very small part of the workshop.
There are alternatives but when you have bought into the full ecosystem of MS, it will take a lot of work to move.
(Full disclosure: I work with both Linux and Windows at a small company where Office means what you mean with office. They are all using libreoffice but call it office)
One word. Cloud.
Sharepoint, onedrive, teams. Everything is integrated and collaborating is trivial. You can’t replicate that with open source.
Ok, but surely google docs does that just as well or even better? I have never even heard of sharepoint and onedrive!
You’re obviously very far from the intended target audience.
I 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.
Yeah, one may not use it but it's hard to ignore when Office apps suggest you save the document to the cloud as a default. I do avoid it and don't really need any collaboration but I understand that I'm minority. On my home workstation (which is mainly used for video editing) I have only local account so I don't get sucked into more MS services. But at this point you have to actively try to get around the default setup with online account and cloud apps, so it's indeed hard to ignore.
Google Docs is not the comparison here. Google Workspace is.
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Nope.
It’s akin to being in the AWS ecosystem and having to switch to Oracle. It’s less so MS Office but rather the SAAS and enterprise security stuff in 365
Collaboration
> Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades.
That explains it I suppose.
"Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades."
and thats the problem, the fair comparison would be like You replace AWS with hetzner vps
So its a good idea :)
HarmonyOS is gaining a lot of traction in China and has WPS pre-installed
https://www.wps.com
I've never used it but apparently it comes with ingame purchases.
Which 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.
> 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.
Yeah, 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.
Governments in Europe are increasingly ditching Microsoft, goaded by souring relations between the continents.
This is what can end Microsoft domination. The US is becoming a hostile power.
Don'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)
My 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.
That's a Microsoft problem, not a FOSS problem though.
Don't over-estimate that neither.
Things can be done in such ways that there is nothing visibly incompatible (ie scripting behind some forms), you can always just print and fill the document if needed, and anyway most documents are static pdfs with optional plus for filling some fields in computer.
I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally.
Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
> It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck.
Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.
> not economical viable
I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
>Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.
I was working at a particular organisation 13 years ago, and we were tired. Everything was a half completed project. Everything needed work. One of the file servers was busted. We had cobbled together enough to make the customer experience ok, but the guts were on the deck.
The organisation expanded, hired a new CTO, moved the old Pseudo CTO to an architect role. New CTO sat down with everyone in the team for a 1 on 1 chat.
He asked what the biggest issue was, I said we needed time to fix everything and make it work. He said everyone on the team told him the same thing. That we have a solid environment and it just needs to be completed.
Next day he announces a shift to the cloud. We had all our priorities suspended as we forced 365 and Azure into everything. I bailed like 3 weeks later.
I think it is economically viable but we as devs have to realize our true worth here beyond just a paycheck.
Do you think that LLMs will do much to help to alleviate this?
I just did a major refactor of a project to move it many versions up on a framework and whole process was effectively vibe coded. I'd estimate I did in a couple of days what would have taken a couple of weeks.
That's good and expect that could be shaved down even more. I was spending most of time just waiting for it do the work.
But I don't know if that fundamentally changes the situation or not. We've had steady improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.
Thanks for your honest opinion. Not sure why you were downvoted.
Likely because some people don't like to hear about positive experiences with LLMs.
I don’t get it either. I feel people are increasingly knee-jerk about downvoting, triggered by certain phrases, perhaps „vibe-coding“ in this case.
Link to blog post? Didn’t see it on quick look at your site.
Outside of any engineering issues there are a plethora of regulatory and compliance barriers. I think this is actually a much bigger issue than lack of developers.
> And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
Cross-platform compatibility is trivial with modern tooling IMO.
On the surface level, building/compiling/running, maybe... But properly integrating with a given platform (or hell, version of platform!) is a whole new world of pain. :(
The talent that would do such a thing gets acquihired while the competition meets an early end.
Google Workspace is the similar product. It does basically all the same stuff. Tons of companies use it instead.
It's just extremely complicated to transition between the two. So Google is more popular with newer companies, since it's a bit more seamless being cloud-native, whereas Microsoft has inertia with companies that have been around longer.
No one has developed a full alternative in one package. That's because some of the practices are really bad and shouldn't be solved the way the GP describes they are solved. Data stored in SharePoint, the worst MS tool ever maybe, is one example. O e wouldn't build another SharePoint, because why make something that sucks so much and then store data in it? It is moronic to do that.
And the GP is right in that the more moronic stuff people do, the harder it gets for them to no longer do that and somehow extract all their data into usable and useful form. Microsoft will happily go on making bad products, if that keeps its users prisoners.
An all in one? No, maybe Google Workspace. But for all those pieces you can get all that functionality from different vendors / open source projects.
I guess there's a strong opportunity for someone to build a Linux distro that bundles all of it for you in such a way you could use it OOTB for a company.
Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!”
Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.
The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint.
Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.
Your analogy is apt, but can be extended a bit further to show why MS is so successful.
Imagine organizing a meal out for 5 people. Easy. Despite the vegan, gluten free, kosher, high protein, lactose intolerant, no-fish, only fish, carb free dietary requirements there are lots of places to choose from. You can even order from 5 places and get 5 meals delivered.
Now do that for 50. Or 500. Or 50 000. Sooner or later you start going to buffets. Sooner or later the food becomes very bland.
You judge your software purchase for yourself based on features and moral principles and likely price.
Business doesn't really care about features. It does care about suppliers. It does care about the reliability of the supply chain. It doesn't care about price (at least not at the Windows / Office price point.)
I've been a supplier to corporates. The paperwork (and commitment) is substantial. Insurances, liabilities, support levels, release procedures, accountability,,,, it goes on for days.
The moat MS has, has nothing to do with software. Which is why that "better software" fails - because it is optimizing for one kind of "better" and business defines "better" another way.
And no, nothing is "replaced easily" in the enterprise space. When 10000 people, scattered over 1000 locations, get all-new software, nothing about that is easy.
What about Microsoft Outlook & Exchange for email and calendar? To me, that is an incredibly wide moat to cross for enterprise software.
> This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.
Is there? Maybe Google docs.
It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
The truth is, only a fraction of your users needs MS products so much that they will die on this hill. Legal, accounting, maybe procurement. That’s it. For everyone else Google Docs are actually better.
Google Sheets can do a lot, especially if you have automation tool like Zapier. Excel is no longer a moat or the moat. Powerpoint… jain. It’s cool, but Miro and Figma eat that cake nowadays.
"Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!”"
Tell this to all office alternative lmao
I tried them all and all they do is sucks, even the strongest competitor is (google docs,sheet) feels "lacking"
How did it get this way?
A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember.
Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications.
It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.
It’s the horizontal integration across Entra, not the Office experience, that is the lock in
This! It’s of course a lock in, but a very important feature for governance, nonetheless.
As much as everyone complains about Microsoft Office the historic alternatives were all much worse and eventually all collapsed under their own weight.
Companies that had a successful niche, like Lotus, failed to keep up.
It depends on your needs. Many businesses get along fine with Google Apps or Zoho.
It is perfectly possible to run a company with at least 1k employees on non-MS stack, throwing a bone of Office apps to (small) legal and accounting teams, so that they approve the budget. I did that before.
There are thousands of alternatives, but they are not connected as seamlessly like Microsoft would like to think you it all is.
On Microsoft admin/entra/management webpages each weblink does something completely different, yet it provides a very convenient interface.
You're not kidding! I did a deep dive into this a few months ago, and the alternative situation was dismal! LibreOffice is the closest, but its performance has room for improvement.
Microsoft 365 isn't just the office suite though. It's the office suite, email, PIM, chat, wiki/collaboration, document management, and a lot more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_365_applicat...
Exactly - that's what I was trying point out in my original comment. The desktop office apps are actually reasonably easy to swap out for a large portion of people. It's the rest of the M365 suite which is massive.
and, its so cheap. there are alternatives for individual components, but nothing that comes close to being this low cost. And, the ultimate value is that if you buy a niche tool (like notion) then only people with licenses can use it. Everybody at the company has office, so it's easy to share/collaborate. You have to really commit to avoiding office at all if you're going to replace parts of it.
Zoho Office isn’t bad.
It looks like a lot of the project planning SAAS are trying to take the crown too.
It’s just strange that Google seemingly gave up.
How did Google give up?
Google Workspace is extremely popular with new features coming out constantly, used by tons of corporations.
Is it just not on your radar or something?
I suspect my country is the same. I expect most countries are the same.
Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?
Russia is definitely not the same. I suspect they are still largely using (pirated) Microsoft products but cloud services hosted abroad are a big no-no.
IT departments often lack the skills and/or desire to use anything but MS
Reverse argument is true as well.. If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.
All software is vulnerable, so what you're saying is not true. The only reason the products you listed seem more vulnerable is because they are focused by malicious actors due to their popularity and hence, also more often in the news.
No, I think you’ll find certain legacy corporations have terrible codebases and very little incentive to fix it, because why fix what makes money and has no liability?
Europe is doing a pretty good job on slowly veering off this addiction. Might be worth reaching out to them for knowledge sharing or two
Europe has just started making a few inroads in a few places. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question. This is basically 1% of what would need to be done to be secure against state mandated compromise of Microsoft.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
Is it? The whole thing about replacing MS with OpenOffice and the LibreOffice or etc. has been going on for decades in Europe. Usually it’s just talk or a few municipalities that try it and then silently revert back to MS soon after.
Are we really? As much as I want to believe this and as much as some people want this, is is not yet the case AFAIK. Some govts. had some success recently though, like Schlesswig-Holstein.
The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)
Well Europe had better hope this is true, because we are heading to a future where US SaaS products should be treated with at least the same level of suspicion as those Israeli fleet management apps that keep turning up on Samsung Android devices.
At the moment you can more or less, I suppose, trust that Microsoft, Google and Apple are not actively spying for the newly anti-European goals of a protofascist federal government, but I am not sure that trust should be extended to cloud service providers more generally, let alone social media companies.
Europe has maybe two years to find a new level of technology independence and it cannot wait.
Trump's government has made it text, not just subtext, that they intend to interfere with further European integration (which is also — coincidentally or not — Russia's top foreign policy goal).
The EU should assume that this is a declaration of cold war and act accordingly:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald...
"it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible."
.. until it doesn't.
There is a very good reason why switching away from M365 is almost impossible.
There is a very good reason why Microsoft offers free consultancy for a while if you just keep using M365.
Microsoft has made the world dependent on them. They are one of the biggest corporations that use drug lord tactics to keep its users.
The European Union sees it and is trying to fight it with all its might. Which is very very difficult when you're fighting a company that has more power than certain governments. It's like fighting the drug lord while still purchasing opiods from him.
> drug lord tactics to keep its users.
What on earth are you talking about?
Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. It's a huge logistical challenge, not because of anything Microsoft does, but just because they're different systems and migrating data and processes is inherently hard.
Vendor lock-in has always been the product.
This is why I’m surprised by headlines like this”nobody wants to by Microsoft’s AI” like, every corporate M365 user must be either considering it or already started the purchasing process.
Like a lot of enterprise features, the actual users have hatred or indifference, but the purchasing carries on anyway.
Same in Australia
OK, supposed Claude in X many years could write a drop in replacement for every single one of those things. Would you raise your rates in the meantime too?
It's funny reading the child comments completely glossing over your comment and just suggesting using Zoho or Google Docs lol
They 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-publish...
> They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026.
You have my sympathy. I was also a frequent MS Publisher user, and I always felt that not many people knew about it. It's a useful, simple DTP package suitable for many less complex page layout scenarios. After the End-of-Support announcement, I switched to the LibreOffice Draw already. Fortunately, LibreOffice Draw works quite nicely as a Publisher replacement for me. There is also Scribus [1].
[1]: https://www.scribus.net/
The worst part about MS Office isn't the direct user experience, because I can usually choose to use other software. The worst part is that I and everybody else are subjected to the documents that Office produces. Their defaults and their UX inevitably produce stuff that is hard to read and inconsistent, unless you fight the software really hard and make sacrifices with your desired output. And there's no escape from it. Another specimen of Word's 2.5 cm margins, 200-character lines in poorly designed knockoff Helvetica will probably find its way to my mailbox before the end of the day.
The 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.
A lot of this seems to be related to death of the amateur and semi-pro DTP industries:
1. Printers stopped catering to semi-pros and became more binary between "home" and "enterprise" solutions, with very little crossover and with "home" products trying to be as "good enough" dumb as possible (and also in many cases nearly as hostile to semi-pro usage as possible because so many "home" printers became loss leaders for ink cartridge subscriptions).
2. A lot of DTP moved to web publishing. Who needs printed invites when you have "evites"? Who needs printed greeting cards when you have "ecards" and now Facebook walls and group messaging stickers/gifs/memes? Etc.
I have fond memories of the home DTP creative scene in the 1990s. Partly because my mother was deep into it and very creative with it. It is interesting how much has changed between that era (when Publisher was one of several nearly ubiquitous home tools alongside Print Shop) to today (where Print Shop is a dead brand for many years and Publisher has been zombie-like or comatose in the same span, and now scheduled for death).
Aww yeah Print Shop! Dot Matrix cards ftw!
No-one will pay for it, but the presence of Publisher, as a tool that people know and use, in the Office Suite, would probably be a substantial feature for many people.
Which is funny because here in Seattle there is starting to be a resurgence of DTP to some degree. But it's very underground and, being already in a tech hub, likely very niche from a macroeconomics viewpoint.
And for publisher there probably isn’t the same network effect as for Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
> 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.
> There isn't because any serious print shop will laugh you out the door if you come to them with a Publisher file.
You say this like customers don't show up with a PowerPoint file.
I'm pretty sure they not only show up with a PowerPoint file, but one with missing/nonembedded fonts, web images, perhaps even a video in there somewhere. At least that's been my experience with people sending me stuff to print.
When I did IT work for my university, I was in charge of a big plotter printer that the science students used to print posters with summaries of their research for conferences. The only format I ever got was PowerPoint. Based on the number of search results for "powerpoint research poster template", it looks like this PowerPoint is still the format of choice.
I never really thought about it, but it is kind of odd that the same community that loves using LaTeX for document formatting and typesetting research papers is also using PowerPoint as a desktop publishing substitute.
Sorry but what does this mean? I can't quite parse it. What tooling was ubiquitous?
They probably meant Publisher, which was a part of every more expensive MS Office deal. It was simple to use and much more suitable than Word for simple design jobs (business cards, leaflets, stationary, etc) and with which the "average" MS Office user could now do what was once the domain of DTP "professionals".
I did not mean this.
So please tell us what you did mean.
I am perfectly happy with the original statement.
Taken literally, your statement said that [non-pro] DTP died because it had good tooling. I don't know what tooling for DTP is, but it seems unlikely so good that it would kill the software it supports, so your comment seems like nonsense. Why bother posting it if you're perfectly happy with that?
The real truth is more boring: DTP didn't die at all, it just merged as a category of software with word processors because computers got powerful enough to run programs with a union of their features. Whether the programs in this new combined category got called one thing or the other mainly depended on their history: Word and InDesign today have a lot more in common with each other than either does with programs from the early 1990s that are nominally in their respective categories. Whatever you were saying, it didn't seem to be that, so it was wrong anyway! But I asked nicely because I was curious if there was some substance there.
[flagged]
No, we don’t mind. Go ahead.
I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too.
It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?
I'm going to imagine anyone who needs to make fold-out leaflets is going to end up either doing it in Creative Cloud (i.e. InDesign), or these days, will just do it in Figma or Canva.
Microsoft abandoning Publisher is just another example of Microsoft's endless tactical retreats. Eventually, they aren't going to have anything other than Word and Excel (and maybe Outlook, but I'd say it looks iffy for that one).
PowerPoint is probably the replacement because it doesn't restrict where things can be placed (at least not by default). Word would be much more suitable, if only they made and advertised some sort of DTP mode that would do away with the image position defaults and let users put things over margins.
Do you mean changed the default text box / picture / drawing canvas mode from "in line" to "in front of text" (which lets you put it anywhere, including over margins)? You actually can do that in advanced options. "DTP mode" sounds like marketing overkill for a simple option but maybe it would help.
Pretty much. The pattern I'm noticing is users see that drawing in Word is cumbersome (layout features "get in the way") while in PowerPoint they can put things all over the place, so they naturally gravitate towards PowerPoint when they feel they don't need a classic letter layout but rather an "empty canvas" they can do whatever with.
It can all be done in Word too, but most people I've seen using Word don't bother even setting image placement for each image or change margins. They just stick with what's default.
I actually agree with you that a whole mode is an overkill, but I think whatever they put in they'd have to market pretty well so users would consider it at all. So it also makes sense to me they'd say "use PowerPoint instead" as it is what many are already doing.
> How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!?
There appear to be templates for this in Powerpoint
You need more than a template if you're going to make a booklet by folding a piece of paper in 4 - half of the "pages" (quarter pages) need to be upside down.
In truth, I haven't tried this in Word either, although it appears to be possible in page setup. Maybe I just stopped using Publisher when I started getting duplex printers. Or even stopped needing silly layouts for school projects.
Isn’t that a feature that best sits in the printer dialog, to be used with whatever application you want?
I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".
Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.
>My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed
For most it didn't. The non 365 Office came in 3 tiers Student, business, and enterprise. Publisher only came with enterprise.
What's crazier is that it actually stops working if installed.
Of the last two times I had to make a flyer, one of the two I pulled up PowerPoint to accomplish. It's not a completely outlandish direction. They should add a Publisher mode that transforms the interface for print document design.
> Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint,
"Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?" "I believe he did."
Powerpoint for DTP... did the person writing that know what Publisher even is ?
Not to worry. Once they unleash those AI enhanced vibe programmers that are doing %33 more programming on this problem all will be good. The AI is already helping them to become more profitable by making it necessary to charge more for their product. The sky's the limit. Or Skynet's the limit;)
InDesign also includes Pantone and is the logical go to for anyone who truly cares about modern DTP
Weird 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.
Except Publisher was never good compared to the competition.
Sunsetting a product to save money smells like promo-driven culture
This one caught me by surprise. Publisher is a really great tool to create internal documents…reminds me of the Adobe Fireworks fiasco. They force you to use a tool of which you only need 5% and pay an increase cost (time and subscription) 500%.
I mean, Powerpoint, really? That app should’ve been gone a long time.
I was thinking the same thing about people seemingly not knowing about Publisher.
And I always found those memes about photos moving around your text annoying, because that it literally what you want when making a document (you know, what Word is designed for) (but you can just change the behaviour if you want a different layout anyway).
Install LibreOffice.
I used Scribus. Top choice for replacing Publisher by open source software. Scribus is very intuitive and with enough time I could churn out a beautiful looking effective resume on my first try
Not the same feature set at all. And doesn't LibreOffice still have decade+ long issues on anything that isn't strictly word processing?
You can still open them. More than I can say for Office.
Pretty sure Gemini could create a Slides doc from a PDF of a Publisher file.
I 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.
Is 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...
LibreOffice 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.
I can't find references now, but Gnome or Ubuntu had a phase where they were booting the desktop with under 128MB of RAM.
It would be great if LibreOffice had a spurt of speed-ups. Kind what the browser wars also competed fiercely about.
Being written in Java there is no surprise here.
If you want LibreOffice with less Java, you should try Collabora Office. https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-online-now-av... (I'm not affiliated)
Java is optional, not used for any of the core office functionality. You can build and use LibreOffice completely without Java.
XLOOKUP is so nice though. The other stuff I can live without, especially the UI on data connections changing all the time and the connections breaking anyway.
Word 97 was basically feature complete though (if buggy - the same bugs persist today of course), including track changes and compare/merge documents. The killer feature now is being able to work on the same document with multiple people and seeing their changes in realtime. You used to be able to do this on-prem but that product (Office Online Server) got killed. I wonder why.
FWIW, both OnlyOffice and LibreOffice support XLOOKUP. In fact LibreOffice has over 500 Excel formulae, which is very close to the number of formulae Excel has.
Unless you use a lot of VBA (and you can't translate it to Python), or you've got some proprietary COM addin that you can't live without, LibreOffice's Calc is a pretty damn good replacement for Excel for the majority of users.
Office 2003 supports OOXML rather than the proprietary binary blobs that are office 97 formats.
Good to know! I pretty much only use it for excel w/ (C|T)SV files and to make word art so I hadn't noticed.
Honestly not sure I've ever used any of the new Office features past maybe Office 2000
Most 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.
They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year.
Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again.
I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".
I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).
People still appear to use Flash these days by downloading an old version and getting a license key from Reddit/YouTube/etc.
I didn't really want to resort to piracy; I think it's stupid that Adobe won't sell a perpetual license.
I got a license to Moho from a Humble Bundle like a year ago, and I think Toonz is open source nowadays, all in addition to the ToonBoom copy I have so I probably don't need the real Adobe Animate anymore.
Are you sure it still offers perpetual licenses? Because I just checked the Toonboom site and didn't see any.
Maybe you got in before they enshittified too :)?
Looks like you are correct: https://www.reddit.com/r/ToonBoomHarmony/comments/1ktuhtv/to...
Glad I snagged it when I did (though admittedly it was probably a bad impulse purchase since I don't really animate much anymore).
> the last pre-subscription version
Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
They're routinely cheap on Groupon as well, often under $30.https://www.groupon.com/deals/world-office-standard-2024
Not that I want to encourage people to keep using Microsoft products.
The pace has probably slowed down, but problem isn't so much that they're not adding anything, it's that the additions are either somewhat niche (e.g., new Excel formulas), don't work as well as they should (e.g., syncing), or are confusing (e.g., the new Outlook that lives alongside "classic" Outlook).
Multiple people being able to edit the same file simultaneously with no or minimal issues is pretty bug, though…
It generally doesn't work though. There are usually huge delays to the point of it being unusable.
Can confirm as someone who was using pre-subscription Office to write/read files while everyone else at work was using the 365 version. Now that I'm using 365 too, I do however appreciate the ability to do shared live editing in the office programs.
> 2013, the last pre-subscription version
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.
I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.
now I wanna try running office 2013 in wine
running a VM just for occasional office use is annoying to deal with
edit: activation is probs the main issue
There have been huge changes and improvements in Excel
People no longer really look at a product and ask if it does what they need, they just compare it to the previous product and ask if the newer product has 'more.' More is ALWAYS better, and there's no reason to think past this stage.
In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete.
Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.
> Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98.
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
The only main feature post 98 is that the file format is zipped xml documents. Before that it was proprietary binaries.
Lambdas, PowerQuery and Python support on Excel aren't in Excel 98.
SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.
I 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.
I 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.
Office 2000/XP with the XML based file formats would be perfect.
It's not exactly the same, but I definitely remember Microsoft releasing some kind of conversion tool around the start of Office 2007's life that could convert the newer XML based files into the older '03 compatible files. Or maybe it was the other way around... No idea if that tools still kicking around somewhere.
And this is exactly why I use Libreoffice.
Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.
Track changes and collaborative editing are both pretty important features IMO
The only feature they added is you can't open other Word files so you need a new version.
O365 lock-in is all about Outlook.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.
Is there really any moat around Outlook, though?
This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.
This 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
Business basic goes from $6 to $7. Business premium is unchanged from $22 to $22.
Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.
> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
> Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
There's no substance to this comment. It's pure speculation. If you actually want to look at evidence, look at the recent news that Microsoft has cut AI sales targets in half.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
Ironic that you posted this as a comment on HN.
> Ironic that you posted this as a comment on HN.
It’s not ironic at all. Posting here was deliberate to highlight the bubble that happens here for consumer products. This comment section has a lot of people evaluating these price hikes as if they were targeted at HN individual users, not for a product targeted at a different audiences and corporate subscriptions.
Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market.
Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
As for AI demand: If you don’t think AI is in demand, you haven’t been looking at the explosive adoption of AI tools from ChatGPT to Sora (consistently high on app charts) by consumers. These products are in high demand, though you’d never know if it your only perspective was through upvoted HN stories and comments.
> Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, we can be out of touch a lot of the time, but I kind of hate that this has become the "smoking gun" to dismiss comments on Hacker News. Yes, one person was wrong about Dropbox and said that they could just use an FTP server. Yes, people on here agreed with that person. Yes, sometimes our ability to do things low level blinds us to the fact that the majority of people can't or simply don't want to.
That said, most of the negative feedback people get for these things is actually good feedback, and most of the time when people say a project can be accomplished by doing XYZ, that's usually a valid point. Technical people can absolutely be out of touch (and I'm probably worse than average about it), but that doesn't automatically mean that a comment on HN is invalid or useless.
While saying "no one wants" the AI features might be a bit of hyperbole, I don't think it's super out of touch, and this is evidenced by the fact that a lot of the VC money for AI ventures is drying up. AI is neat and here to stay, but I think a large chunk of society is coming to terms with the fact that it's not nearly as cool as it was promised to us, and getting a little annoyed with how much AI crap is being thrown at us. YouTube is getting filled with low-effort AI video and AI voice and AI script bullshit, the average web page is turning a tinge of yellow from all the AI generated images that seem to be all over the place, searching is getting almost as bad as it was in 2005 when "SEO" became a thing because of all the AI generated blogs designed to steal clicks. None of this stuff is relegated to the technical crowd, this is stuff even normies have to deal with.
And within the scope of HN, I'm sure all of us are getting a little tired of having to review pull requests with huge chunks of clearly-AI-generated code that the writer doesn't really and are large enough to not be realistically reviewable with a lot of shitty, low-effort code.
I broadly agree with you but the AI demand part is more nuanced. Demand is very large for consumer-ish apps like ChatGPT and Sora, but even Claude, which is huge for coding and arguably the best model right now, is tiny. I've had an interaction with someone nontechnical who, after seeing the Claude logo bounce, asked me why my ChatGPT had fireworks.
Yeah, the demand is there, but I have a hard time believing nontechnical people are clamoring for Copilot, they likely don't even know such a thing exists. The market is insane right now.
> but even Claude, which is huge for coding and arguably the best model right now, is tiny. I've had an interaction with someone nontechnical who, after seeing the Claude logo bounce, asked me why my ChatGPT had fireworks
So they had used ChatGPT enough to recognize that you were using a different tool?
I don’t see this as contradicting anything. Even the nontechnical people in your life are familiar with these tools because they’re using them.
I agree MS365 or whatever the official name is nowadays is just a tax write of for companies.
There are alternatives for consumers but enterprise isn't going to screw around with those.
> Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
Which customers? Some enterprise customers want AI, others restrict its use. Other want integration with something other than Copilot.
Business basic goes from $6 to $7
So a 16% hike when current US inflation is 3-4%?
>So a 16% hike when current US inflation is 3-4%?
When was the last price hike? Looking at historical inflation and working backwards, you only need to start at around late 2021 to get 16% cumulative inflation. In other words if they didn't raise their prices for 4 years, they'd be at par with inflation.
edit: another commenter mentioned the last price hike was around 4 years ago, so it's indeed in line with inflation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192356
Since when does any organization factor in inflation for renewals from vendors?!
All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
1) Will they budge on renewal rates?
2) Does an alternative vendor exist?
3) Is the increase reasonable compared to the cost of switching to an alternative?
4) Do we anticipate future price increases, and if so, how can we prepare ourselves to consider a switch in the future?
>Since when does any organization factor in inflation for renewals from vendors?!
Don't ask me, ask the person who posed the question of inflation in the first place. That said...
>All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way. Inflation affects everything in the economy, so a company that doesn't raise prices in line with it is losing money. Even SaaS businesses with low marginal costs aren't exempt, because they still need to pay salaries for developers and support staff, both of which roughly track inflation. Therefore if business see price hikes that raise with inflation, they can assume that competitors will raise prices as well, and it's not going to be worth switching unless they're already on the fence for some other reason.
> All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way.
Only if you assert that all prices move together at the same velocity.
It's usually a reasonable thing to assert, when the economy isn't in a complete revolution. And it's a really bad premise right now.
Any experienced procurement or FP&A team will be doing this
Percentages are fun because they can make something with a small absolute change look like a giant change.
No business is really going to care about $1.00/user, especially when it costs hundreds of dollars per user (or thousands) to migrate entirely away from the Microsoft ecosystem.
For an enterprise with fungible employees there is nothing cogent to migrate to.
And where could you migrate to?
How much inflation has there been since the last price increase? From 2022 to 2025 it look likes like about 11%, so not all that different if you're trying to keep a round number.
Did you notice every price was a whole number?
Or that this was for business accounts that were already cheap? $1/seat isn’t going to cause a mass migration off the platform.
Or that some of the price hikes were 0%?
Fixating on this lowest price increase is deliberately misleading.
You would also have to go back and calculate price increases over time to compare against inflation over time?
If they charged by the day then (rounding up for your convenience) gets $31/mo, you're missing a trick Redmond ...
Are we treating MS like a start-up now?
> Their average customer is probably demanding it
The average australian customer managed to get angry enough that the ACCC is working to force a slop free variant and a refund for everyone dark patterned into upgrading.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
You're completely right about this. But how does the Venn diagram look for features between different Office versions and for customer needs? Another commenter here said that Office 98 is good enough for most users, and I have to agree.
What reason is there today for somebody to upgrade from a 10 or 15 year old version of Office? Is Copilot it?
I've managed a very information-intensive career so far without using MS Office. Apple's iWork software is perfectly fine. And I'm not avoiding Office out of any principle. If I needed or wanted it, I'd be happy to pay for it.
> What reason is there today for somebody to upgrade from a 10 or 15 year old version of Office?
Collaborative editing
People here do seem to miss that they added this relatively big feature. The problem for Microsoft is that Google Docs also has collaborative editing, and in my experience, it actually works better.
From what I understand, this was introduced in Office 2010. But maybe it wasn't good enough?
> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever.
Except there are not really any competitors if you look at the whole package.
A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange.
The fact you get the big-four (Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint) thrown in is really just icing on the cake.
> A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange.
That's a negative.
For end-users maybe, but for the business' IT who get a working mail server they don't have to mess with, and a whole remote work and videoconferencing package that "just works" and most people already know how to use, it's a hell of a deal.
Kind of hard to understand what it does that Google Workspace + Zoom (or any other provider) doesn't?
I'm seeing a very common pattern of Google Workspace + Google Meet, Zoom seats for people who need to remotely control computers, and then Slack or ones of its competitors for chat.
Because ...
Add on top of that, you can (depending on package) get Active Directory ("Entra") and MDM ("Intune"). So you get credential management and the ability to push out Group Policies to your user's machines.Look, I'm the last person to defend Microsoft. But if you are a Microsoft shop then it does, sadly, make a lot of sense to take a Microsoft sub.
Google + Zoom + Slack is 3 separate accounts. Corporate only wants 1 account.
Teams has annoyingly some lock in value for 365. Nobody should prefer Exchange Online over Exchange though, Microsoft is too unreliable of a service provider.
The great unwashed masses will still continue to pay it. It's not a sizeable increases that they'd be willing to move elsewhere. People rationalize it in the context of it's only a buck a month and other things increase by more. M$ are not stupid but do know what they're doing. May take is. Don't do drugs. Don't do subscriptions. Don't do MICROS~1.
In my experience, most people, especially execs who are negotiating the licensing deals, want Copilot. Even if they are underwhelmed after using it, at that point, MS doesn't care. They already have your money.
>How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing.
There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.
There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.
But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.
But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.
But where will the next generation be shifted to?
Launched to Europe after Canada? Then launched into Space?
It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.
That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.
I didn't mean to imply Germany isn't independent and at the same time we can't trust our allies. It's mostly that the monster game puts risk downstream too. And some have it really bad if you're going for citizenship. I know, it seems like it's just a fucking Office Suite.
I wish I could agree with this, but the ecosystem lock-in is too great. They might lose business for sure but it may not put a dent in their revenue at all.
If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smaller orgs it might be easier, but those don't pay Microsoft as much anyways.
From a user point of view, there are tools that have similar features, some even better features. G-suite is the only platform i know of that unifies all the office productivity products like 365 does. But neither G-suite nor any other platform can be managed/policed as well as 365. At the end of the day, will Google behave any better than Microsoft anyways (cost or otherwise)? And it isn't just policing and management but securing all that precious data in there, Microsoft might not be great but lots of tech-debt has gone into securing it within that platform. A migration would be costly, justifying it with cost savings alone might be difficult.
> If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.
At least in my workplace, people do their best to avoid using sharepoint and onedrive anyway.
Are there downsides to OneDrive?
I can see being resistant to change, haven't had issues with it (and have benefitted from the auto save quite a lot).
It's not at all about being "resistant to change". OneDrive has been around long enough that it doesn't really count as "change" anymore.
There are downsides to OneDrive. Topping the list is the risk of data loss. Every dev here has at least one story of OneDrive getting confused in a way that led to data loss (that's usually what got them to start avoiding using it). It can also be inconvenient and get in the way in more minor ways, such as causing path confusion with some applications.
The benefits, at least where I work, are pretty minimal. So, on the whole, people tend to keep their documents in unsynced folders. The only people I've talked to here that have anything positive to say about it are managers.
Is this the SharePoint backed OneDrive that you get with a business subscription?
I've had some irritations with it, but overall having versioning has been a much bigger benefit than the hassle.
in corporate america, it's everywhere, to the point where people's compromised accounts being used to send phishing content via sharepoint/onedrive is extremely common. It is (rightfully) highly encouraged as well due to their built-in data loss prevention stuff (Microsoft information protection/MIP), it's the only reasonable way I've seen to get a handle on secret documents/content/slides from leaking too much.
Most of their enterprise clients get bundled services so it often still retains its competitive edge. Their Power suite, Teams and the existing integrations make it cost effective even with the increases.
Other than Google, what are other competitors that worth evaluating?
Unironically Proton. Seems like they are slowly building their own suite of office tools.
Zoho and Collabora spring immediately to mind.
Zoho is crap. Sure, on the tin it comes with 64 different things, but many are poorly integrated and feature set is just enough to be like "Yes, we have that feature."
Interesting. I know I'm not a very demanding user of word processing or presentation software. But I've been using zoho for basic business stuff for one of my businesses since 2019, and I wouldn't call it crap. It's not amazing, but I pay something like $12/user/year. And I get shared docs/sheets/decks + pretty decent email. And their transactional email service (zeptomail) is actually top notch IMO.
What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?
I am a home user, but I use Zoho's paid email service as a backup and alternative to Gmail and Outlook, and it is pretty decent and extremely affordable.
As of what date?
Probably been about 2 years since I was forced to last use it but with amount of slop being added, their development priorities would have to massively changed.
Gotcha - way more relevant than my experiences!
Thanks
Canva is a go to over Microsoft and Adobe for a huge crowd of people
Collabora Online
For which feature?
How people in companies really need the features of Word, Excel and PowerPoint?
I often see people using space to right align a date, the pros use tabs.
Open source... But yeah.. ms won this game
There is no foss competitor to Excel.
Libre Office Calc is pretty similar to Excel for general use. For importing csv files it has always been superior to Excel. Some niche areas in Calc are also better than Excel. Inflexible users are locked into Excel, but for general purpose use Calc is all you need.
Libre Office is great for replicating what Excel did 10 years ago. Excel has a lot of things that power users use (like Power Query) that Libre Office simply isn't even trying to replicate.
When developers tell me that I could use Calc rather than Excel, I ask them if they would be OK being forced to use Emacs or Vim, whichever is the opposite of what they spent the last decade perfecting.
For legacy spreadsheets, you're 100% correct. I'll need to keep a version of Excel around forever. If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want, a perpetual license to Office 2019 runs about $20 and will do that job for me.
For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
> If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want [...]
In case you aren't aware, when they try to sneak Copilot onto your plan you can get rid of it by going to your plan management page and canceling. One of the offers they should offer to try to get you to stay is your old plan without Copilot.
> a perpetual license to Office 2019 runs about $20 and will do that job for me.
Isn’t that only perpetual as long as the activation servers are up?
Probably. I meant "perpetual" as opposed to "subscription" but I agree with your concern.
You just stash a cracked version downloaded off some high seas site just in case.
None of the things you listed are suitable replacements for Excel. None.
It has nothing to do with existing files/compatibility. Excel is unparalleled.
That depends on your workload. I've been using Excel since 1993, and I find the things I've listed help me get things done just as well as Excel does, unless I have a pile of macros and vbscript I need to interop with.
This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.
The solution is actually just not using Excel. If you're essentially using Excel as a LOB backend and database, that should probably not be in Excel.
It's fine if you have a few formulas. As soon as you're busting out macros it's time to sunset the workbook and make an application. There's a lot of God Excel workbooks sitting around on share drives with no audibility or quality control.
Yes, there's many many cases that should likely not be using Excel.
But given that Excel is the second-best tool for everything, world runs on it.
And when you try to build systems to replace Excel for a specific task, you quickly learn how extremely powerful Excel is and how hard is to replace it and add value that customers would care about.
I've been there, the problem is that replacements are not as versatile or "floppy". But that's also a good thing, because Excel is too versatile to the point where most workbooks are filled with bugs on top of bugs and nobody cares.
Yes, bugs in sheets are worst part of excel, by far.
But many end users prefer dealing with bugs than with inflexible software that doesn’t understand all the different ways how real world is messy and hard to model.
I hate using Excel. But I 100% understand why world runs on it.
Have to disagree. It depends on what you are doing. That the alternatives can be replacements, including the open source ones, is relative and should be looked at as a percentage.
If you listed out all the things that Excel can do, we might find that the alternative is at 80% or so (just a number), with some additional things that Excel can't do. That 80% could be good enough to switch. It should not be looked at as "all or nothing", especially for every person or business.
Can it open Quattro Pro files?
Open Office, Libre Office, Only Office to start.
I want to love these, mostly because they're FOSS and Office/Google Spreadsheets seems to get more and more bloated, and subsequently slower.
But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
Many would say that the FOSS alternatives don't copy Office enough. Often, by going there own way with various tasks, they create a bigger jump. Case in point, the Linux distros that attract the most attention for common folk and not niche use, are the ones that are more Windows-like. Examples: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, etc... The smaller the jump, the more you can convince people to switch over.
When there is a significant difference, it needs to be shown what the equivalent is in the alternative. The jump can be a bit mitigated by education or information, but usually by only so much, where it's still seen as attractive.
I think the main issue for most people is that the layout is slightly different, probably to help prevent microsoft from suing them.
But once you get used to those differences, (also, knowing that there are a handful of themes that can shorten the difference significantly) then it becomes a non-issue after less than 10 hours of use.
LibreOffice seems to have an optional ribbon-like interface for the people that happen to like it (View -> User Interface) (but I don't use this UI mode as I personally find ribbon-like UIs hard to work with).
> But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
Speak for yourself. I see that LibreOffice's default UI is still a normal WIMP UI and this is a plus for me. I hated when MS Office switched to the ribbon in Office 2007.
"So you want to insert a row in a table? Great, just click on Table > Insert > Row... Oh well. Nevermind, just show me your screen and I'll hunt the functionality in that stupid ribbon."
We don't need less, but more, Office programs that respect GUI UI conventions.
Have you tried grist[0]?
It's self-hostable (and the community version is FOSS I think), and really useful in a way I find better than just a spreadsheet.
It's no good for importing complex excel things, but I've found it very useful for new work.
[0](https://www.getgrist.com)
That actually looks kind of neat, similar to Airbase unless I'm mistaken. Thanks for the recommendation, I'll definitely check it out.
Check out Only Office. It's an almost total copy of the 365 aesthetic.
Yeah, that's the opposite of what I want, then I'll just continue using Excel... What I want is for someone to figure out a better UI and better UX, not just copy what's out there.
My hot take on a better excel: the two things excel sucks at: version control and syncing. On the backend, separate the data and the logic in the spreadsheet and put each into version control. Then use something like syncthing to share documents with colleagues. You might also need something like bitmessage for initial handshake. Now you have a spreadsheet you can collaborate on in real time over the Internet or LAN without screwing around with a server, a google account, a credit card etc.
There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.
I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...
Try https://rows.com/ai
Yes, but take OpenOffice off the list, development has slowed to a glacial pace and it’s close to abandoned in favour of LibreOffice, which is actively maintained.
Looks like there was finally a OpenOffice release recently but that was after years of people complaining of security vulnerabilities not fixed in the release version.
Google Docs works fine for most people though (not FOSS, but most Office customers don't care).
My 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.
It’s about the same price without the AzureAD stuff or AV integration even if substandard. Also Google emasculated its Google sites.
Or power point. I had to make some slides for the first time in a decade. I was in Google Slides for 5 minutes, then I tried to import an SVG.
That was the moment I booted into windows for the first time in 4 months. I started up Power Point and sure enough SVGs are no problem.
Shameless plug: Row Zero has real enterprise traction. AWS uses us.
2B row limit, connected, eliminates the Excel security risk because it's hosted.
But for many of Excels use cases
If you think there are competitors, you are clearly mistaken of what exactly O365 is.
Nobody offers what Microsoft bundles here. From editors, to storage, to communication to identity to management.
And I say this as someone who hates dealing with Microsoft and their products.
Can I just get the version without CoPilot for cheaper? Or at all?
Likely they'd charge more for it.
I think the only way to get the no-Copilot version now is to already have the Copilot version and try to cancel your subscription, and only then they'll offer the "Classic" version sans Copilot as a last ditch retention effort. If users actually wanted this stuff they wouldn't need to bury the option to not pay for it.
Google was increasing their pricing too. Also before last year they were charging an extra license for Gemini but then decided to throw it in.
If 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.
I'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.
This is why Google Docs was so revolutionary... In 2006.
I cannot understand why they haven't got more traction today.
If 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.
Multiplayer PowerPoint is the single largest advance in the business world since the spreadsheet.
If used properly.
The 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.
I think a surprising number of companies only survive because Microsoft Office gets around hostile internal IT departments and gives workers capabilities they can’t otherwise get on their locked down workstations.
It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.
Bullshit. Just from a document editing perspective, going back to a network share where only one person can edit a doc is not going to fly. I used to have to deal with this as IT/desktop support and it fucking sucked. Docs in the cloud give you better collab capabilities and remove the need to have fancy networking, VPNs, international security exclusion groups etc, domain controller bullshit, connecting all of the companies offices together. Connect to the Internet, and all your stuff is there no matter where you are. It sounds like you've never had to support the infra for office workers before. This is way better than it used to be. For a small company, sure, do whatever. But the bigger it gets, the harder all that shit becomes and requires a lot of work to keep it running.
> If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted.
But what about the impact of increased productivity when not having to deal with the garbage that are New Teams and New Outlook? The employees would start doing more in lesser time and the companies could potentially make more profits too. Why would they want that if they could just be locked in with Microsoft month-on-month? /s
They’d get owned by security vulnerabilities in the first hour, fwiw.
Security has not been Microsoft’s priority for many years now. The CEO just says some words that don’t mean anything.
Ah yes security, the ultimate shakedown mechanic. Tony Soprano should've been in software sales. "You don't want anything happen to your nice little business do you??"
I 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-Hol...
Should be the standard for modern governments.
Switched to the free OnlyOffice a year ago and never looked back: https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE
Wow, 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?
It can't handle OpenDocument files (odt, odp, ods) well. Only a one-way import is supported. 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
https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office is a thing as well, and I prefer it to Only Office. The maker is German.
It's a bit slower performance wise
here is a (somewhat biased) comparison between OnlyOffice and Collabora Online
https://www.collaboraonline.com/comparing-collabora-with-onl...
"Somewhat biased" is a gross understatement here, holy crap.
We 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.)
Speaking of online use please see: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs
I 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.
Is 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.)
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.
For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
I agree 100% with this, since I've been trying the same. Although I do think some power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs) instead of having these monstrous Excel spreadsheets with millions of rows and columns.
> power-users take it way too far and should be using more robust data analysis tools (Python, DBs)
But they they wouldn't be power-users anymore, they'd be developers. It's just an entirely different world.
excel power users are developers
When all you know is Hammer...
I agree and you'd be surprised at the response when I showed some of them how to do it in python numpy.
I tried showing a finance guy a Python version of a levelized cost of electricity spreadsheet he made. He laughed in my face and continued using Excel to drive executive decisions.
Dinosaurs gonna dinosaur. Teach his kids about the virtues of source control and testability, and the problem will be resolved in the next generation.
How are you going to get access to his kids?
Schools, Youtube, etc.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.
I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Document Foundation so that it can get better, but it moves very slowly.
Have you tried LO's other interfaces under View > User Interface? There is Standard, Tabbed, and five other variations.
The tabbed/ribbon UI should be the default IMO
I have used Typst as an alternative for spreadsheet use cases.
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics.
This might be true. But most Excel users just use the basics and would be well served to switching to a Free Software alternative such as LibreOffice Calc. Which, is also capable to be used in advanced contexts; although for those cases it is different than Excel, admittedly.
I think most of the excuses saying why people don't switch to Excel alternatives are simply coverups for inertia. I understand that; getting out of the comfort zone is difficult. But it's not impossible.
It's interesting how views differ; I have never been able to make decent scientific graphs in Excel while Calc worked fine for me.
Calc has many features focused on correctness and reliability. Excel is a joke on both of those accounts.
Turns out close to 100% of the spreadsheet users out there don't care about that. It's unnerving and absurd, and IMO, what is even the point of all the effort of entering your data and working it if you don't care about the result being correct? But that's how the world is.
I'm an accountant, I get correct answers in Excel because I have been using it for 20 years and know how to do this.
I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.
LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.
Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.
Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.
And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.
For 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.
Power Query + Power Pivot + M. I don't use formulas in cells. The sheets are just a canvas for Pivot Tables, final tables, and charts connected to the data from Power Query and Pivot.
I deal with hundreds of API integrations involving various JSON, CSV, TSV, and XML files with mixed validity. My workflow: Notepad++ for a visual check -> Prototype everything in Excel. I give users a "visual", connect it to real data, and only then migrate the final logic to BI dashboards or databases.
Nothing else delivers results this fast. SQL, BI tools, and Python are too slow because they generally need "clean" data. Cleaning and validation take too much time there. In Excel, it's mostly just a few clicks.
PS: I spent 2 years (2022-2023) using LibreOffice Calc. I didn't touch Excel once, thinking I needed to break the habit. In the end, I did break the habit, but it was replaced by a pile of scripts and utilities because Calc couldn't do what I needed (or do it fast enough). The experience reminds me of testing Krita for 2 years (2018-2020) — I eventually returned to Adobe Photoshop (but that's another story).
PS2: About (Query + Pivot + BI). This allows you to process millions of rows (bypassing grid limitations). It also allows you to compress everything into an OLAP cube, taking up little space and working quickly with data.
Interesting. I'm not experienced in data cleaning. About Python vs Excel: Isn't manual cleanning of data in Excel prone to permanent error? Because:
- it's hard to version control/diff
- it's done by a human fat fingering spreadsheet cells
- it's not reproducible. Like if you need to redo the cleaning of all the dates, in a Python script you could just fix the data parsing part and rerun the script to parse source again. And you can easily control changes with git
In practice I think the speed tradeoff could be worth the ocasional mistake. But it would depend on the field I guess.
Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?
If they do serious financial work I for sure hope they do not use Excel or any other spread sheet tool. It can go wrong so many ways.
Oh friend, if only you knew.
Not only that, software nerds are rediscovering that they can build so much in Excel. You don't need an app for everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Planning_Analytics
>When Visicalc was released, Perez became convinced that it was the ideal user interface for his visionary product: the Functional Database. With his friend Jose Sinai formed the Sinper Corporation in early 1983 and released his initial product, TM/1 (the "TM" in TM1 stands for "Table Manager"). Sinper was purchased by Applix in 1996, which was purchased by Cognos in late 2007, which was in itself acquired mere months later by IBM.[3][2]
TM1 is widely used as a way to interface with official ledgers.
Perhaps serious finance professionals learnt double entry accounting, checks and balances etc. and know how to avoid those errors?
Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes
> Perhaps serious finance professionals learnt double entry accounting, checks and balances etc. and know how to avoid those errors?
Sure, but they also use accounting software, not Excel.
> Software developers on the other hand never make mistakes Sure they do, but they use testing and typed languages etc.
The problem with Excel is comma vs dot, locales, fat fingering, out of range errors, too easy to change a cell formula by mistake etc.
If you think spreadsheets aren’t used in serious finance, you’re going to be very disappointed if you ever have to work with that world.
Yup, I have. And had to deal with converting "this awesome tool that does X, Y and Z" to an actual multi-user app because it was just so great. You end up discovering that there are tons of miscalculations in these formulas that only surface when you start writing tests for them, and that a lot of the business decisions based on these tools had flawed assumptions.
Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
Thank you for doing the lord's work, brother.
My first job out of uni was developing a devops pipeline for Excel spreadsheets after one went rogue and cost the broker trader I was hired by $10m in one fun afternoon.
And a devops pipeline developed by a recent graduate is guaranteed 100% error free?
An application I consulted on was a web interface that made heavy use of the Excel portions of Microsoft Graph so that the finance team could continue to send clients spreadsheets that they could adjust without also sending them the formulas to "steal" (and take other parts of their business elsewhere, to noticeable millions of dollars of project spending habit shifts). The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"), so it was wildly custom solution to figure out where formulas existed in any of the spreadsheets finance felt like giving to the app, build a custom UI for entering the inputs to those formulas, run those formulas most with Microsoft Graph cloud magic/some with other web libraries, and return the results.
If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
>The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"),
If the finance team suggested you have to write all of your code in C using Emacs would you be OK with that?
I would like to see the finance team that codes all their own C code and is adamant it needs to be in Emacs, especially because if they are that deep in Emacs I'd be wondering why they are insisting on C rather than Emacslisp or something even more esoteric like GNU Guile or someone's custom Forth to Fortran compiler…
But to answer the question, that is where I finished. We weren't "okay with it" that the finance team insisted on a C# to Excel files in SharePoint/OneDrive via Microsoft Graph turducken. We lived with it because the finance team had enough of the metaphorical keys to the car to be deeply in the driver's seat of that project. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and deliver what the customer wants.
It's how Linux is written so they must have great taste.
Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in Excel?
I know plenty of people who think they do. I know a few that cost the world economy about a trillion dollars: https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-spreadsheet-error...
Going by what my accounting buddy says - everyone in accounting in the US.
I know a few people who use Quantrix for financial modelling. It is an exceptionally nice piece of software, basically the successor of Lotus Improv, with Improv's more robust and auditable separation of data and formulas.
I used Apple Numbers for all my spreadsheeting so it depends what you mean by "serious financial work". The vast majority of folk could probably get by without using Excel I am guessing.
I sometimes use Apple Numbers for some quick and dirty lists, but it severely lacks in keyboard use and keyboard navigation when compared to Excel.
As a home user and a Mac user, I haven't needed Office in well over 15 years given iWork and Google Docs.
My company pays for office though, and I end up having to use it to play their Sensitivy Rules games for labeling files.
Excel has amazing super powers.
PowerPoint is underrated.
For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.
I'd still consider Excel best in class
While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version.
You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
I wish standalone versions were still standard, but the latest Excel versions have been adding really useful features in the core formula language.
Sharepoint and office is the modern version of cancer. Nobody wants to manage onprem AD and mapped drives because cLoUd is the solution. Doesn't help that Microsoft stopped caring about onprem.
"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.
I 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!
This will ruin the formatting randomly. I would not do this if you're working on a deadline.
I agree that Word has a million replacements. Hell, I usually just roll with a markdown file.
But nothing beats excel or power point.
Excel has no competition whatsoever in the local software space. Google Sheets is somewhat useful for 80% of users but for people who must be on-prem/local it’s Excel or nothing.
Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?
In practice, it's like how having Adobe Reader used to be. You mostly don't need it, but occasionally you need it for interoperability with other people, such as lawyers.
Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.
Considering 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
Seriously. 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.
A 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.
5% 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".
At 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.
It's more a ton of inertia than some sort of monopoly. A lot of new companies immediately start on an alternative these days. They don't see a reason to pay the higher price.
I agree that it's a lot of work to build something that can render and edit their complex format, but quite a few companies have managed now.
> 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.
> All of these are compatible with Office formats.
To a limited extent, for the reasons that the person you're replying to laid out.
At this point?
I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files.
Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite well. Sure, Microsoft has a little bit of a leg up, but it's nothing like the monopoly they had on .doc.
Today, we expect programs to be able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. In the 90s, we truly didn't. Yes, there might be some advanced things that don't always work, but it's so different today.
I got a bad grade in a highschool English class because the teacher didn't like the doc file generated by StarOffice. My dad came round the school raising hell and got her to grade the paper on contents, saying if they wanted me to have office they could buy a copy of it. I got an A- after that
That's good fathering. Respect.
> 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.
The 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?
My OneDrive went from 70 to 100 USD. That is a huge increase.
In 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/...
Microsoft 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 or check out the web version: https://tritium.legal/preview
Yeah, 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.
Yes, 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 :)
> 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)
That business model exists and appears here periodically complaining about how unfair Microsoft is. We don't care, we'll meet Microsoft where they are and just offer their customers a more specific solution.
Then make this specific solution open source, and make the laywers pay for support and roadmap decisions / features they require! Make them pay for integrations with Azure AD and struff like this! Make them pay for the binary! The possibilities are endless, it can work!
You can aim for better than "where MS is".
This could constitute a killer argument to make your solution appealing.
The 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.
My 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.
I 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.
>" 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.
Amazon ($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.
I 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.
I 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
I use the personal subscription for the onedrive storage for my phones fotos
One 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.
To 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)
They 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Yes, 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?
On the contrary, I don't think end-user market forces are having any significant effect at all. There's currently boundless slack on that side as far as Microsoft is concerned. The only thing effecting the prices are the upcoming quarterly financials. "Line goes up" is the only economic law at play here. Their hopelessly trapped customers should consider themselves lucky a steeper deflection wasn't in order.
Have you stopped and thought about what you're saying or are you just assuming this is expensive because it's Microsoft and they're Bad?
Let's actually look at what you get for your money (I'll just go by current consumer pricing since it's easy to find/understand):
Microsoft 365 Family:
$130/year
6 people, 1TB storage per person
Each person gets 5 devices for all Office apps
Higher AI usage limits than free (only primary user, not shared)
Let's try to buy this from someone else:
Google: $99/year for 2TB, shared between 6 people, but your limit is 2TB total. No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI which bumps this all up to $20/month with no additional storage. I can't actually see how much additional storage costs to make this equivalent to 1TB/person without signing up.
Apple: $420/year to get 6TB of storage shared between 6 people. iWork apps are garbage, no AI included. iCloud+ does have some side features like private relay, custom domain email, etc.
Proton Family: 3TB, $288 a year
pCloud: 10TB family lifetime plan is $1500, equivalent to about 10 years of paying for Office 365.
All this to say, tl;dr, Microsoft is actually offering one of the better deals out there especially if you want to give a significant amount of storage to each family member at a low cost.
> No Gemini in Google apps unless you're paying for Google AI
Not true. Gemini in Google Apps (Gemini for Workspace) is included by default as a set of core features (Help me write in Docs, Gemini side panel in Docs/Sheets/Meet, etc.). The AI Pro tier of Google One adds additional AI functionality, (billed annually, which seems the correct comparison given all your other price quotes are per year and seem to use annual billing pricing, it is $199, or $100 more than the 2TB tier without AI Pro.)
Interesting, Google’s price comparison made it look like free tiers didn’t get that.
I did try to use annual pricing with annual discounts wherever I could, some services don’t really list it explicitly.
I will admit Microsoft’s pricing doesn’t really look as good if you’re not sharing the storage, and they get demerit for not providing a free tier for most of the apps at all.
LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.
The 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
Copilot in every nook and cranny…that stuff costs money!
Shouldn'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.
In 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.
I 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.
As 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...]
I'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.
Interesting. Businesses I know banned use of anything cloud based, especially if the hosting is owned by the US company.
They 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.
Weird 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.
I 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.
Anecdotally 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
wouldn't it be more honest to call it M355 rather than M365?
2026 will be the year of the Libreoffice desktop!
I 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).
NextCloud?
yep! alternatives do exist - and Nextcloud is a good decent one
Haven'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.
Way 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.
I 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. It includes various edibles too.
That you would mind.
But yes your point is correct.
The 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.
There are also positive news in Dataverse: Environments get some free capacity upgrade: https://licensing.guide/december-2025-dataverse-default-capa...
Well, 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.
While 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?
LibreOffice 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.
It 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.
> 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.
I 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.
O365 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.
Really weird considering google docs and libre office exist - what do you get if you pay m$?
Who still uses this garbage? None of these products have meaningfully improved since Office ‘97 —and that was like peak Office
25%++ up in my region (EU)
Hoorah for Libre Office :)
Does 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.
Heroic. 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.
Well 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.
Likely to fund their AI misadventures?
This office suite is less known but great: https://www.freeoffice.com/
Wow now where did this come from??? Never heard of it :)
I wish they would allow Microsoft Family to have personal domains again. :(
That's an interesting way to make up for missing revenue targets.
They saw what the Xbox division is doing and said give me some of that.
Xbox 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,.
I 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.
Which 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
>I don't think the price hikes have been received terribly well
What did I say?
Sorry, 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.
I 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?
I 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 !
Y u no want copilot???
You 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.
> 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.
I stopped paying for MsOffice as soon as they've introduces Office 365. I saw where the ball was going. Sticking with the alternatives
Ooooh but it has AI ;) blergh
WPS - Free tier
Can I pay them more to remove all AI crap from the platforms?
Nope.
Nobody is buying Co-Pilot so....fuggit...jack up the price! What is anyone gonna do about it? Leave? lmao
Enshittification at its best.
The 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).
DOCX 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.
They got into major shit in Australia for their way of increasing prices.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...
This 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.
That often wrong and unnecessary AI bullshit ain't gonna pay for itself!
the era of ai enshitification begins with trying to recoup the costs...
LibreOffice
Why do I, as a European, have to pay for Trumpflation?
You 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
they increased the price also last year... i went back to pirating after, dunno, 15 years or more.
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