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Microsoft Increasing Price of Commercial 'Microsoft 365' Plans Next Year
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365 is the bargain of the century for my small business. 500GBP ish a year gets me:
25 copies of Office Professional
5 x 100GB Exchange Email Accounts
5 x Unlimited Email Archiving
25TB of online storage
SharePoint
Office Online
Teams
Azure AD and Intune for end-point management
EMail cleansing and control
...and lots of other stuff I've not really looked into.
I'm sure I could do it cheaper, but within the same ecosystem with the same management platform....? Managing it is a doddle.
25 copies of Office Professional
5 x 100GB Exchange Email Accounts
5 x Unlimited Email Archiving
25TB of online storage
SharePoint
Office Online
Teams
Azure AD and Intune for end-point management
EMail cleansing and control
...and lots of other stuff I've not really looked into.
I'm sure I could do it cheaper, but within the same ecosystem with the same management platform....? Managing it is a doddle.
You are right about academia and LaTeX but that's about it.
IT-related people and jobs do not just prefer markdown format. The ones who do are coders and developers and people with a high-level knowledge of working with computers and software.
PDF is preferred when you do not want to edit it, when you want to see how the final copy will look or if they do not have to change anything in it.
In business, most times, when documents involve text and images together, people are stuck with using Microsoft Word and I have no answer why. There are desktop publishing tools out there, but people are often still stuck with these apps because their world that they interact with is stuck with it.
You forgot PowerPoint.. the malaise of the modern boardroom.
I let my Office 365 subscription expire a few weeks ago. I tried LibreOffice and was surprised how much it has improved since I last checked a few years ago, both in terms of functionality and compatibility. So far it has opened all of my old MS Office files flawlessly, including some rather complex Excel spreadsheets. There is also a good iOS/iPadOS app from Collabora now to read/edit OpenDocument files on the go.
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Ridiculous as well. I have seen companies full on ditch Office 365 and go to Google's option. One of our main competitors in town did so (10k plus employees).
Fact is Microsoft employees hundreds of thousands of people and they get paid well. M/Office 365/Azure is constantly being updated and improved. This is the first price hike in 10 years. My Amazon prime has gone up 3 times in 10 years, Netflix as well and the price of my Apple hardware has not gone down either.
In fact when I got my 2018 15inch Macbook Pro, not only did the price of the Macbook go up....but then if you tack on that "courage" dongle fest I had to buy because basically NOTHING I owned used a USB-C the price went way up. Not to mention I had to use the worst Macbook Keyboard ever, lost my MagSafe and got this completely useless touchbar as icing on the cake.
I love office365 and how I can have it on all my Macs and devices, but it’s supplied by corporate so it costs me nothing. But 24 products? For me, that equates to Word, Excel, PPT, Outlook, Teams (oh how I hate teams), One Drive (like this thing) and 18 “what the heck is this thing” applications.
You literally can’t interact with certain government agencies, courts, etc. unless you provide .docx’s, and using an alternative that may not provide 100% perfect .docx’s is simply not done.
Kind of simple answer, Why learning a new tool when the old one works ,
Considering there are hundreds of companies in every state in the U.S. Considering there are thousands of small businesses in the U.S. Considering there are millions worldwide who are forced to use M$ 365 completely invalidates your point.
Yeah when they raise prices that's how it works. 😉
So? It's common for software to get updated free of charge, even if the software is free such as web browsers.
You're defending M$ for hiking prices?
That's a luxury choice you make. Nobody is forced to use Amazon or Netflix for that matter. 🙄
The subject is about subscription prices so keep hardware out of the equation.
That's your choice. You bought it. Once again this has nothing to do with subscription prices. You just want to tack Apple onto this argument because it's about M$. If you want to talk about Apple hiking their subscription prices then fine but hardware prices and your frustrations have nothing to do with the article. Stay on topic.
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Is it really? (Genuine question btw. When I was at Uni, I used Scrivener more than anything else. I’ve never even heard of LaTex.)
Surprise, Surprise, Surprise. This is why I don't subscribe to services. Microsoft, Apple, Google are going to be copying the cable/phone companies billing methods with charges, increases, and expenses passed on that you have no way to avoid.
yeah, yeah, I know it is only a price increase now. But they all yearn to get you hooked. Once hooked they can shutdown improvements and just ride on the magic carpet of $$ streaming in.
If we could trust them, then OK, but we know we can't. Just look at the privacy issues.
yeah, yeah, I know it is only a price increase now. But they all yearn to get you hooked. Once hooked they can shutdown improvements and just ride on the magic carpet of $$ streaming in.
If we could trust them, then OK, but we know we can't. Just look at the privacy issues.
Either LaTeX or Markdown with a PDF viewer like Adobe Reader can totally do everything PowerPoint can do. In STEM and statistics-haevy portion of the Social Sciences, most people do this for professional presentations, they don't use PowerPoint. For some simple glue-together job, KeyNote is good enough. For something fancy, they use Adobe After Effects. For the mind-mapping type presentations, they use Prezi.You are right about academia and LaTeX but that's about it.
IT-related people and jobs do not just prefer markdown format. The ones who do are coders and developers and people with a high-level knowledge of working with computers and software.
PDF is preferred when you do not want to edit it, when you want to see how the final copy will look or if they do not have to change anything in it.
In business, most times, when documents involve text and images together, people are stuck with using Microsoft Word and I have no answer why. There are desktop publishing tools out there, but people are often still stuck with these apps because their world that they interact with is stuck with it.
You forgot PowerPoint.. the malaise of the modern boardroom.
And that's where the problem lies. M$ is hiking the prices to pay for all those extras that not many people will or want to use but are being forced to pay for.
You are not forced to pay for Azure (for example), and there's a decent mix of licensing available. You can for the most part pick & choose what you want.
Don't forget too that at a corp level what you'll see in the website license mixes isn't often what gets procured. Some of our bigger stuff for example might have E3 (a licensing plan) with some bits of E5 thrown in for free - usually the idea being you get so invested in the 'free' bits of E5 you end up upgrading to E5. Few seem to though! It's more a negotiating tactic for large clients.
Like I say, I quite like the platform. Cost wise it's worked out to be a bargain for several projects - especially around virtualisation. AWS is a lot better for some more ubiquitous stuff but Azure is decent.
Don't forget too that at a corp level what you'll see in the website license mixes isn't often what gets procured. Some of our bigger stuff for example might have E3 (a licensing plan) with some bits of E5 thrown in for free - usually the idea being you get so invested in the 'free' bits of E5 you end up upgrading to E5. Few seem to though! It's more a negotiating tactic for large clients.
Like I say, I quite like the platform. Cost wise it's worked out to be a bargain for several projects - especially around virtualisation. AWS is a lot better for some more ubiquitous stuff but Azure is decent.
It is, mostly in STEM and the statistics-heavy portion of the Social Sciences. For all other fields, typesetting is done by the publishing journal or by a professional typesetter because it takes a lot of effort to learn LaTeX, and if all you are dealing with are just words and paragraphs, it's not that difficult for the typesetter to do it after the fact.
As a quick sidenote, streaming of Windows desktop clients (Windows 365) may be the key to us allowing users to continue with Apple MacOS stuff. That's kinda ironic isn't it aha.
LOL. As someone whose office is currently transitioning from O365 to GW, I can tell you that it's like going from a 16-jet jacuzzi to a leaky bucket. Hate on O365 all you like for its many shortcomings, but it kicks Google's ass all around the block and back home again.
Well you can run nextcloud on prem alltho the colab tools still require a licence subscription if you want it to scale, but I syspect it'll be cheaper than springing for o365 for evrybody in an org, but the
an again you need to pay infrastructure +power, we will have to see what businesses do.
(context) the post the the qooted posr was a reply to mentioned nextcloud
Well we have chices when it comes to software to if we just choce oure words a bit better say word processor with feature x, y and z not word, simmilar for excel etc, if you artificially limit your choice to only ms oroduckrs you cant turn arround and complain about lack of competition. Granted if one of said features are 100% perfect compatibility with the latest rweeks to the iffice file formsts from day one ... you are stuck
This is why Apple needs to make the iWord apps as feature-rich as the Microsoft Office apps. Apple can do this while keeping the price at 0$, making their productivity suite attractive to end users, pros, and enterprise clients, and take a big bit out of Microsoft's business. Apple also needs to beef up the macOS Server app, and reintroduce a real rack-mountable server hardware product, and then they will be on a roll. macOS is at the perfect confluence of operating systems: UNIX/Linux, Mac, and Windows. It would be very easy for Apple to scale the system o be a real competitor in the server and enterprise spaces.
Effective next year, pricing for all commercial plans of Microsoft 365 will be increased as a way to compensate for the "increased value" Microsoft's suite of tools has provided to customers over the last ten years, Microsoft has announced.
In a blog post late last week, the company says the new changes are the first time it has substantively increased the price of Office 365 since it launched a decade ago. Microsoft notes some of the ways that Microsoft 365 has grown in prominence over the last year, including that it has added 24 different apps to its suite of tools.
The pricing increases are small, consisting of only $2-$4 hikes, and are as followed:
All of the changes will apply globally on March 1, 2022.
Article Link: Microsoft Increasing Price of Commercial 'Microsoft 365' Plans Next Year
LOL let's be real about this. I would love to see the iWork suite compete with M$365 but we both know that can't happen. Apple's suite requires a Mac. That eliminates a lot of customers since many have Windows machines. Even if Apple introduced iWork for Windows and it's a smash hit it won't put a dent in M$'s monopoly with Office, which is sad but true. M$ should not have a monopoly on an office suite but they do and people in the business world see Office as the defacto standard just because "everybody" uses it.
I hope you realize if you thought of it then so has Apple? It's just not something they want to do or feel worthy of putting a lot resources into. Apple's way of grabbing the market isn't just to do something the "simple" way of thinking. For example people said all Apple has to do to make their computers run cooler and have longer battery life is to simply make bigger laptops. Well that's the simple way of thinking and it's not efficient. Instead Apple has been working on their Apple Silicon chips which have proven to be far more efficient in running cooler than any other PC on the market in the same class as well as more than doubling the battery life of most laptop computers.
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Don't forget the poor table formatting in Word while Excel is a powerhouse... Excel is the only reason I'd pay for Office.
That’s the whole point of 365. Instead of waiting for a few years for a collection of updates, you get updates on a continuous basis bit by bit. In the end, the applications are still getting improved and updated, not having to wait for years for actual improvement.