Microsoft Increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 License Prices

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

My company pays for office though, and I end up having to use it to play their Sensitivy Rules games for labeling files.

But nothing beats excel or power point.

Likely they'd charge more for it.

Price increases are normal. 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.

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.

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.