Refund Requests Flood Microsoft After Tricking Users Into AI Upgrades
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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Dark Patterns
Microsoft faced backlash and refund requests after allegedly tricking users into upgrading to AI-powered Office 365 subscriptions, sparking concerns about dark patterns and the value of AI features.
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Nov 6, 2025 at 8:21 AM EST
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ID: 45834932Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 12:26:32 PM
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Was this just a dark pattern or did they flat out hide the classic option?
Isn't this textbook dark pattern?
The irony is, at least in my case, I made the impulse decision to just cancel outright instead of accepting the lower price, which lost them what had been a 15 year recurring customer. I’m one person, but I wonder how many others did the same.
sorry... I know it has its problems but makes it hostile? (My knowledge of Microsoft CoPilot begins and ends with its chat thing)
Is there _actual_ regret here, or is it more of a "sorry we got caught" type of thing?
I'm tired of the price hikes for AI - if it was good enough without AI, it's should be optional and a separate sub. It's an enhancement not a core feature.
-The Copilot key on all my recent laptops literally does nothing, other than pop up a preferences dialog that allows me to choose between 'None', 'Search' (which just redirects to a Bing-Webview-from-hell) and 'Custom' (which just informs me that I have no suitable providers installed). So, yeah, 'None' it is!
-The Copilot button dropdown on my MacOS 'New Outlook' (the only platform on which that is slightly usable) displays an empty menu. Asking web-based Copilot about that, its response is "yeah, well, that is quite a tease, isn't it"... Uhhhm, sure?
-Copilot code completions in Visual Studio only ensure a quick trip to disable them. I mean, maybe 5% of the time they're topical, but the remaining 95% is just cases of it trying to insert 20+ lines whenever I make a simple typo. I mean, really?
But, yeah, I guess we're stuck with this kind of nonsense for the foreseeable future, until it starts to hurt. But, that might be a while...
Collabra Office seems to be the port of LibreOffice to ios. (free) Look it up on the app store.
> Collabora Office is a text editor, spreadsheet and presentation program based on LibreOffice, the world's most popular Open Source office suite - and now it's on iOS, enhancing your possibilities to work on mobile devices.
Collaborative versions, a.k.a. Collabra online are available, but hosting is never free.
But TBH, I am your "more casual than casual" office suite user and the bundled Apple apps do my minimal office tasks, and are compatible with MS formats.
[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/
[1] https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...
[2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/