I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.
I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.
So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? That vendor lock-in is obviously part of the con (see for instance the complete and very deliberate lack of portability of documents created in OneNote, if you don't have the Professional/Enterprise version). And there are innumerable better services out there, many of which are even free.
We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore.
Microsoft 365.
Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
Job tracking system.
Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.
Freshdesk.
Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
Miro.
Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.
This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?
I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.
> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.
> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.
Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.
But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...
Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.
One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).
I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.
> it's cost competitive with all the other email providers
Have you looked at MXRoute? We pay $65 per year for unlimited domains and addresses. Not a huge amount of storage space so there's a bit of education in getting people to share large files using another service, but otherwise it's great value.
This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!
Dunno about all other things, but it's totally possible to self-host email. I do it for myself, and I did it when running the IT of a media company.
I now work for the government, and I know that sensitive mails go through foreign entities and none can do anything about it because we lost not only the skills but the understanding that mail can be self-hosted.
You absolutely can host your own mail server. Or use one of your IT partner of choice. Out business still has an exchange. Today you have to jump through some hurdles with SPIF/DKIM, but it is still very possible.
How is that even comparable? Said wage earners aren't even getting to choose which tool they use; let alone those two expenses being remotely comparable in qualitative terms.
Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add".
Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.
That sort of exists. You heard of home service plans? You pay a fixed fee to some provider, and they the cost to send a plumber/hvac guy/whatever if something breaks. For software, instead of getting your toilet unclogged, you get small features and bug fixes.
"I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.
I have Office 2010 on an old computer."
Statement #1 will trigger a stream of HN replies that ignore statement #2 and attempt to justify the price increase from $0 in 2010 to whatever Microsoft is charging today. It is anyone's guess why this happens.
The old computer is the author's personal computer, not one owned by an employer with a "Professional/Enterprise" license. This is clear from the final sentence of the comment.
The author is not the only recreational user who still has an old computer with Office 2010 (I have some other past versions of Office as well) and is aware of the con.
> I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.
True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost.
Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable.
Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.
>I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.
You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette.
Contrary to what the propaganda wants you to think, I suspect the majority of people who have the brain to oppose are not opening every file that's sent to them by strangers.
> You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite.
Is there any "patched" office suite up there ? Microsoft was never famous for its security and Google is of "ship it first, fix it later" and "extend the attack surface as much as possible" philosophy.
Huh, there must be(tm) a scanner for malware for these files. I know they're XML, although I wonder how much of it end up being base64-encoded binary blobs...
I've long felt that consumer acceptance of this pricing correlates with whether the subscription has a cost-of-good-sold component.
Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
>and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
You underestimate the technical sophistication of the average user. Even with perfect docs, there's going to be 1% (or whatever) of customers that call into technical support asking questions. That's essentially COGS.
Office suites are particularly annoying as for a home user ... most people don't use much at all.
If it wasn't for the office sort of standard, you can get away with just not using an office suite, lots of good options out there. Free / surprisingly capable apps.
I'm weird and use TeX for my resume because I'm an annoying nerd, but I literally have not encountered an Office document in over a decade. I see Google workspace at work for my last couple jobs, and there's libreoffice if I occasionally want a spreadsheet at home. Everything I encounter from banks and governments is web or pdf these days.
You still can buy Office standalone licenses with Classic Office (aka desktop apps). I got myself 2019 and 2021 versions (different OSes) and prefer them. However I've a personal MS365 subscription for business, I like permanent licenses for products more.
On a related note - I bought some permanent licenses for devtools, where they advertised subscription model only :) Directly reached developers and asked if it's possible or not. Works well for both sides - I probably paid for the tool more than their average subscription lifetime, but I've got few tools that I need to use occasionally but over a longer period of time - e.g. one tool I used maybe 10-15 times, but over a 7 years.
That does not work with bigger companies though :(
Windows Enterprise edition has been subscription-only licensing for several years. The lowest edition cost is about twice that of Professional over a five year period.
For those unaware, if you want to use the latest Office Suite (2024), but don’t want to pay a monthly fee, Microsoft still offers a one time purchase [0] for $149.99 which is now cheaper than the (new) one year subscription (with no cloud storage of course).
One catch though is that this can only be installed on a single PC (and there's online activation, so it will actually check). So if you have a desktop and a laptop, you'll have to pay double, whereas subscription covers up to 5 devices, if I remember correctly.
I find it increasingly hard to justify any sort of SaaS subscription these days. Is the value you get out of Microsoft 365 really that much greater than any of the open source alternatives? So much better that you let a corporation dictate the terms of your computing environment?
It honestly makes me angry. And I say that as someone who works in the industry for a SaaS company. The only SaaS I reluctantly pay for is Fastmail and that's only because it's basically impossible to host your own email these days if you care about your email actually getting delivered to all those Gmail and Outlook inboxes out there.
Are you kidding me? For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / products. Let's list some major ones.
Exchange online with 100GB mailbox.
Onedrive with 1TB storage
Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user
Full desktop office applications
Full browser office applications
Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey
Teams
Planner
Bookings, so Calendly...
Anti-virus
MDM
MAM
Windows 10/11 Enterprise
AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations
A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this.
There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...
MS has a good deal on offer if you're an IT department looking to pay less for a suite of SaaS tools that would be more expensive as one-offs. But very little of this is appealing as an actual user. It's basically Office and an inconvenient to use 2TB of storage.
When someone is saying how they don't want to keep paying for SaaS it's almost certainly as an individual because businesses in a position to buy all this crap are large enough where this isn't even a blip.
It depends. If you need basic word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and email, you can definitely get by with alternatives. If you want more advanced functionality, you’re more likely to run into limitations or just things that work differently than what you might be used to. Microsoft 365 is not better in every way, but it’s a strong contender.
I suspect the familiarity and compatibility probably cinches it for a lot of people. Honestly, the convenience and familiarity are valuable, even if you and I would prefer open source options were more popular.
Microsoft 365 is good value, and it comes with many services. I wouldn’t have a personal license but it makes a lot of sense at work if you don’t mind sharing your data with USA.
How’s that a surprise? Microsoft dangles npm, TypeScript, GitHub, and VSCode, and suddenly people develop collective amnesia about their past behavior.
TS, GitHub, VSCode and ChatGPT are going to make the EEE days look bush league. There's an entire new generation of programmers that have a visceral hatred for doing any unassisted programming or writing a single line of code they could have downloaded off NPM.
They're going to be 100% non functional when that stuff isn't around for them, so the industry can expect to get absolutely fucking raped when that bill comes due.
Would be a good time to invest in Microsoft if they weren't shitting the bed so badly on everything else.
To be fair, I doubt anyone working at a publication that has articles like "Ferry cancellations and delays: your rights" and "What to consider when joining a gym" on the front page knows about microsoft's involvement in npm, TypeScript, GitHub, or VSCode.
I cannot think of a single non-business oriented user who needs MS365
Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago, business users are either using organizational licenses or are small-business users who aren't using family plans to begin with.
I'm mystified by who the affected audience is of this.
M365 Personal or Family can actually have a place as cost-effective cloud storage that 'just works' for consumers that don't care to go down the self hosting rabbit hole. It happens to include an office apps suite, but even without that it's extremely price competitive with other consumer-focused cloud storage. For $6-7/month you get 1TB of online storage, or for $8.25-10/month you get up to 6TB. Their competition (Apple, Google, Dropbox) pretty much all start at $10/mo for 2TB, possibly with paying for a year in advance.
The business plans are a different matter, but can make sense particularly if you're actually paying salary/wages for someone to maintain and support a self-hosted alternative.
Sure but what do you actually use office for in your day to day home life?
I stopped paying for it in like 2010. I haven't needed to make a formatted document since college, and I graduated in 2006. Google sheets is quite good enough for my random spreadsheet usage.
My use case: for 100$/year, I can provide my family and my parents plenty of reliable cloud storage for their documents and pictures. With office suite thrown in as added bonus. I know of no other alternative that would provide equivalent of 6x1TB for such a low price.
I was also of that opinion for a while, but took the decision to move all things to a dedicated backup service instead. The lock-in with onedrive is palpable. So I swallowed the pill, downloaded all our files (very slowly...) and backed them up properly instead, with a service that will send me a hard drive with my files upon request.
UK Colleges and schools use MS, so students don't have much choice.
Some UK government stuff appears to be MS only, which really is awful. Of course it's Microsoft's "open" formats; so you can use FOSS alternatives but MS will screw up the formatting.
> Rather than sneaking an extra $5 a month, perhaps Microsoft should focus its efforts on making Copilot valuable enough that its customers will actually be willing to pay for it.
Someone at MS with a sleek haircut will hold a PPT demonstrating how both Copilot usage and subscription income went up.
I use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft 365. It is free and can load and save DOCX files. Plus I use LibreOffice in GNU/Linux so it is cross-platform and compatible.
I tend to write in markdown. If someone needs a Word Doc/docx whatever format they're using these days, I use pandoc to generate it. If someone sends me a docx file, I can read it with my choice of software without paying the MS tax.
On the very rare occasion someone sends me a docx file that they need me to edit and send back to them, I'll do it with whatever is handy and if they complain I messed up their formatting or whatever I can blame Word bugs.
I own a MS Silver Partner (int al). They (MS) are a handy place to stuff things for a while until something better comes along and I have lots of options. It takes a while to scale!
At the moment, dumping VMware is taking quite a lot of my time too.
I went to the trouble of looking up what that Silver Partner thing is. It means you're paying more than $1k to MS annually. You "own" a subscription? What does it do for you?
I still don't understand the rest of your comment.
Readit News
I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.
So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? That vendor lock-in is obviously part of the con (see for instance the complete and very deliberate lack of portability of documents created in OneNote, if you don't have the Professional/Enterprise version). And there are innumerable better services out there, many of which are even free.
Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.
Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.
Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.
This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?
I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.
It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.
> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.
This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.
Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.
But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...
Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.
One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).
Have you looked at MXRoute? We pay $65 per year for unlimited domains and addresses. Not a huge amount of storage space so there's a bit of education in getting people to share large files using another service, but otherwise it's great value.
Email saas vendor only lock-in seem to be the root of some vendor lock-ins.
Dunno about all other things, but it's totally possible to self-host email. I do it for myself, and I did it when running the IT of a media company.
I now work for the government, and I know that sensitive mails go through foreign entities and none can do anything about it because we lost not only the skills but the understanding that mail can be self-hosted.
You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.
> I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing
Why not self-hosted alternatives?
> Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.
I find that hard to believe. Even cloud backup services are not that expensive.
How is that even comparable? Said wage earners aren't even getting to choose which tool they use; let alone those two expenses being remotely comparable in qualitative terms.
Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.
With so many moving parts and sweat getting on parts, things always needed replacing.
Also when I did have our home we paid service contracts for the yard, the weeds, termites and pest control.
When we turned it into a rental before we sold it, we also had a monthly home warranty.
But, in the case of MS Office, unlike Adobe, they still sell a copy with a perpetual license that you only pay for once.
I have Office 2010 on an old computer."
Statement #1 will trigger a stream of HN replies that ignore statement #2 and attempt to justify the price increase from $0 in 2010 to whatever Microsoft is charging today. It is anyone's guess why this happens.
The old computer is the author's personal computer, not one owned by an employer with a "Professional/Enterprise" license. This is clear from the final sentence of the comment.
The author is not the only recreational user who still has an old computer with Office 2010 (I have some other past versions of Office as well) and is aware of the con.
True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost.
Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable.
Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.
You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette.
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide filter for "office"
Contrary to what the propaganda wants you to think, I suspect the majority of people who have the brain to oppose are not opening every file that's sent to them by strangers.
Is there any "patched" office suite up there ? Microsoft was never famous for its security and Google is of "ship it first, fix it later" and "extend the attack surface as much as possible" philosophy.
Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.
You underestimate the technical sophistication of the average user. Even with perfect docs, there's going to be 1% (or whatever) of customers that call into technical support asking questions. That's essentially COGS.
If it wasn't for the office sort of standard, you can get away with just not using an office suite, lots of good options out there. Free / surprisingly capable apps.
OneDrive Family plan is still the cheapest and largest cloud storage (6TB of cloud storage for $99/year).
But we should fire microsoft engineers for making a cost efficient binary.
Not saying that's wrong, just reframing.
Also this debate is so 2000s, we've been over this, things need updates, for security at least. Who's gonna pay for it.
It is (or was) cheaper to signup for 365 than by the same storage in dropbox. It is cheaper to get that package than get Zoom.
Deleted Comment
Microsoft's home page is advertising Microsoft 365 "For 1 person" literally as I type this!
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
Hey Microsoft PMs, here's a feature for you: "Want to save to disk? Add the 'Save to Disk'-subscription, just $2/month!".
What the hell
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
It honestly makes me angry. And I say that as someone who works in the industry for a SaaS company. The only SaaS I reluctantly pay for is Fastmail and that's only because it's basically impossible to host your own email these days if you care about your email actually getting delivered to all those Gmail and Outlook inboxes out there.
Exchange online with 100GB mailbox. Onedrive with 1TB storage Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user Full desktop office applications Full browser office applications Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey Teams Planner Bookings, so Calendly... Anti-virus MDM MAM Windows 10/11 Enterprise AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this.
There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...
When someone is saying how they don't want to keep paying for SaaS it's almost certainly as an individual because businesses in a position to buy all this crap are large enough where this isn't even a blip.
How many of those do you use?
Deleted Comment
They now have a $10/mo plan where you pick any one application.
I suspect the familiarity and compatibility probably cinches it for a lot of people. Honestly, the convenience and familiarity are valuable, even if you and I would prefer open source options were more popular.
They're going to be 100% non functional when that stuff isn't around for them, so the industry can expect to get absolutely fucking raped when that bill comes due.
Would be a good time to invest in Microsoft if they weren't shitting the bed so badly on everything else.
Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago, business users are either using organizational licenses or are small-business users who aren't using family plans to begin with.
I'm mystified by who the affected audience is of this.
Of all the things that didn't happen, this didn't happen the most.
You use Google docs.
The business plans are a different matter, but can make sense particularly if you're actually paying salary/wages for someone to maintain and support a self-hosted alternative.
- Office apps for all of my devices - Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web
- 1 TB of cloud storage
And then I get both each for up to 6 users.
Dropbox’s 2TB storage plan by itself is $120 a year.
GSuite is okay and it’s our corporate standard. But it is nowhere near as good as Office
I stopped paying for it in like 2010. I haven't needed to make a formatted document since college, and I graduated in 2006. Google sheets is quite good enough for my random spreadsheet usage.
Lots of people who don't need "business" office just use that, and even some businesses do.
Some UK government stuff appears to be MS only, which really is awful. Of course it's Microsoft's "open" formats; so you can use FOSS alternatives but MS will screw up the formatting.
Someone at MS with a sleek haircut will hold a PPT demonstrating how both Copilot usage and subscription income went up.
At the moment, dumping VMware is taking quite a lot of my time too.
I still don't understand the rest of your comment.
I remember I tried this years ago, and it broke all the formatting that other window users see.
Office purposefully doesn't follow its own documents' standards, and renders with particular quirks, so that one gets the experience you report.
Clearly they haven't been Microsoft customers very long, if there's still goodwill and trust.