This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
The clippy we all deserved
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn't add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it's almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
To please the shareholders. Then, when AI is no longer deemed valuable and its tremendous costs sink in, they will remove it and layoff the teams that worked on it, to please the shareholders.
But they'll keep the prices high
It's not for you. It's for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
Meanwhile, smart people: I sure do love Libre Office.
Libre Office.
Honestly - and flame away - I hate the name. I hate saying it. It's the 'moist' of borrowed words. Leeeeeeeebr. And I'm a Canadian who did French up to university-level conversational "explain something for 20 min" French (from a gorgeous caribbean dynamo teacher, but I justif--uh, digress) so I know how to say the word and what it means.
And I still hate it. I'm a horrible person -- even before I continued French study because the prof was so engaging and energetic and brightened every room and every day and made French interesting just on inclusion.
If smart people love libreoffice, then I must be dumb. Working with it always seems weird and I never like it.
Fortunately, I can use LaTeX for work; it is far from without issues but while being arcane sometimes (especially when tables are involved), it never really upsets me and the result looks very good. I can say neither for libreoffice or MS office. But at least the former doesn't charge for the experience.
I hope typst gains more traction; it seems really intuitive compared to TeX and you don't necessarily need a macro package. And while it doesn't produce the quality of TeX-based systems yet, it is already good. Then again, Knuth's goal first and foremost goal was quality (and it shows); the system just had to be usable by him.
You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.
the only problem with onlyoffice is that it's electron.
For existing customers, the price hike won't be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the "Classic" or "Basic" Microsoft 365 plans.
Thankfully we can roll back to the "Classic Family Plan" without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn't see this article I'd be up for a big price hike when it renewed.
But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back.
Should be illegal.
"You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we're done half baking it into all our apps and now we're almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all."
The logic of the utterly deranged...
Oh shit maybe we'll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
Yeah. So it's
right? I forget the name of that add-on.
No, that's not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that's it. But it's only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let's ask Co-pilot again:
THERE it is.
But I learned there's a second alternative, so that's cool. See? Co-pilot has value!
Wait, they think people want Copilot? Like enough to pay money for it?
They are banking on customers being too invested in office to switch.
Clippy is back!
GOZER
The choice is made. The Traveller has come.
VENKMAN
We didn't choose anything?!! I didn't think of an image, did you?
SPENGLER
No.
WINSTON
My mind's a total void!
[They all look at Ray]
RAY
I couldn't help it! It just popped in
there!
VENKMAN
What? What just popped in there?
For anyone who doesn't already know the good FOSS alternatives:
worlds most over glorified over priced office website that runs like a slug
Preaching to the choir here but LibreOffice has been excellent since my MSOffice license expired. Unless you're working in an enterprise setting with MS-specific macros or online collaboration, there's no reason to be paying for basic document editing software in 2025.
There are also self-hosted and open-sourced collaborative editing suites available that I haven't tried yet, but there are plenty of options
I use ms office 2007 it runs perfectly in wine and still has the cool version of wordart
I'm so glad I work in an industry where I can get away with using Libre Office.
Fun story, it's called office 365 as when you see the price you'll turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Ok that doesn't really work but God I love that stupid joke.
Anyway I haven't used office personally for ages and never seem to run into real compatibility issues with the meager personal/business overlap in my situation.
It made me chuckle a little imaging that you do a full 365 degree spin Infront of Microsoft and then walk away (in an awkward way), instead of 180 degrees to walk the opposite direction haha
why not just do:
microsoft 365: 6.99
microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99
You damn well know why they dont do that $$$
… second paragraph of the article:
In addition to the basic plans getting Copilot rolled in, there are now additional "Basic," "Personal Classic," and "Family Classic" tiers without Copilot and "other advanced features" added for users who do not use AI in their workflows
Subscriptions like these have always been a scam.
Fuck the MS suite is such garbage. My work was sold in for Teams with all the BS. Now I have to either map up the filepath creating what we used to have, or I can't see the file folder and make a call at the same time. Onenote with it's arbitrary syncing. And good luck finding it again since it stored at some random place if you loose access.
Word and excel is decent, but for a person who likes to tinker with versions it's a nightmare to invite people to edit it.
Cluncky interface, slow and bloated all around
The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.
There are home users of Microsoft 365?
I'm not shaming but I kinda am. Like WTF is wrong with you? You pay for free shit.
Office employees don't get to choose.
COPILOT IS NOW A PAID FEATURE?????? hell nah, microsoft be banking on their users.
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
"The cost of running the hallucination machine is too expensive so instead of charging people who want to use it, we have instead decided to charge everyone who uses any of our services even if they don't want to use the hallucination machine"
I’ve had nothing but issues administrating Office 365. A price hike like this is incentivizing me to push other products like Google workspace.
Nice parts are definitely user email tools and some of the audit tools, but I keep finding myself in scenarios where I get error 500s on the server side when I pop open dev tools and it’s like I don’t want to tell my users that they’re SOL but they sort of are if I can’t resolve some error on Microsoft’s o365 servers. Microsoft likes to ask what I did to fix the case if I fix it before they do and I just laugh and not rely to those. They can pay me extra for that or hire me if they want that info.