You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase(consumer.org.nz) |
You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase(consumer.org.nz) |
you shouldn't pretend, just cancel your plan, do it!
It also makes me wonder what it would take for IT people to finally stop gritting their teeth about having to use, or having to let others use, Windows and start just dealing with the learning curve of switching to some Linux distro. I mean, Windows Recall is spyware. If it didn't come from Microsoft, Windows Defender would be sure to mark it as malicious... What's the name for a screenshot based keylogger I wonder...
I used to just figure that Windows was just all some people could use. And if that was the best tool for them, then ok. But now? I can't say that anymore. It's out and out malware at this point.
In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? Or is there something good about Windows that you like?
Unreal Engine supports Linux/MacOS, Perforce supports Linux/MacOS.
So, you'd imagine that it would be fine.
Yet UGS (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...) and Playstation/Xbox development tools only work on Windows, and especially focus on Visual Studio (which also only works on Windows).
Things seem more complicated due to Visual Studio Code being cross-platform, and the fact that there's some extremely rudimentary support for consoles in Jetbrains tools, but there's no debugging support at all.
And anyone can download an alternate browser and looking at Chrome’s market share, most do.
What would you prefer? That a browser doesn’t come with Windows and users going to an ftp site to download one like the 90s?
And to a first approximation, no one wants Linux on their desktop.
That’s not really a minor point. It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
Even for certain CAD software I use that has Mac and Windows versions, the Windows version feels so much more performant and responsive. I’ll switch to Windows for anything serious.
Also, YMMV, but in the past 5 or so years my Windows workstation has felt less buggy and more stable than my Macs. I’ve dealt with a lot of annoying quirks on the Mac over the years where the only solution is to wait for the next update and hope it’s fixed. Even today, accessing network file shares is incredibly buggy on Mac in certain cases.
And, yes, software working on your OS is not a minor point. That's the whole reason I used to go with the "best tool for the job" approach. Windows Recall is what changed that for me. I can't see using an OS with spyware built in as a "feature".
In my opinion, Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft, so...
> It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
So, the number of video editing, photo editing, CAD, gaming, and so on tools that work on Linux has grown a LOT. It's not just for basic stuff. You can do almost anything you need to on Desktop Linux. Yes, a lot of things are rough around the edges, but they're that way because people haven't invested in them, not because they're bad tools.
They don't bite the hand that feeds them. Microsoft spends a lot of money for corruption^Wlobby.
Wow I missed this part of the story. It’s incredibly shitty. The are basically making the whole world pay $5 a month for a _trial _ of Copilot ?
Time to collect the rent, peasants.
1. Change your credit card number so that you cannot be billed anymore
2. Use a free and open source alternative. They're good enough at this point
Otherwise you're just funding their grift.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem, iWorks is free, has iOS and desktop versions for the Mac and a web version. But it’s the same argument for Windows users I had for GSuite.
The poster I replied to cares about open source I assume.
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.
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-...
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...
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.
Someone at MS with a sleek haircut will hold a PPT demonstrating how both Copilot usage and subscription income went up.
Clearly they haven't been Microsoft customers very long, if there's still goodwill and trust.
That seems almost malicious
But the problem is that over those ten years google docs mostly feels like it’s been enshittified. Today’s office suites all suck I just want office 2007 or the google docs beta experience back - those were snappy and obvious how to use. Even basic stuff like linear regression in excel is terrible UX these days
And so mostly they don’t care to push it and if they do it’s not a material over modern office anyway.
It can be used to quickly add conditional formatting rules, charts, pivot tables, formulas, perform data manipulation tasks that you would have to use VBA for, etc. It's also private - it doesn't include the data in prompts, only metadata (table headers, etc).
I'm sending invites out as they are requested. You can request an invite here: https://www.incant.app/
But somehow, they have a ton of cash influx that they use to acquire struggling businesses quite frequently.
Less money overall maybe, but also tell you if people want it / see the value...
Seriously the MIT Missing Semester MUST be a high-schools mandatory course, anyone who want to have a non-mere-manual profession must have passed this course. We are in damn 2025, it's about time to recognize that computers are the mean of knowledge like papers and libraries before, not knowing how to use them properly means being illiterate, even with some PhDs.
They have now Edge. With the same characteristics.
Apple AI is terrible and Microsoft's is likely the same.
Old people stubborness can be interesting.
Maintening that subscription is a pain, as MS occasionally change default save location to SharePoint. I'm the sole admin and I've never touched any thing.
Which ones?
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?
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.
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.
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.
And then you have your security risks of duplicating your access control. So you mirror all your employees emails, now you have to make sure only administrators have read access and avoid ever exposing that system to the internet and prevent exfil.
I’m thinking of how to do this for a friends company and the amount of stuff that a SaaS takes care of is staggering. Right now I’m stuck on learning to be my own root CA to distribute client certificates for mTLS so I can avoid relying on third party SSO/auth.
Going from relying on a subscription SaaS service to…still relying on a subscription *aaS service. And you still have the cost of keeping someone on staff to maintain the server and be available at 3am and 3pm.
Now, compare 250-300€/employee/year with how much you spend on salaries, and think how much it's hurting productivity to have these weird (and probably against TOS) arrangements, compared to just paying a few bucks for software.
Clearly, we need an ad-supported $0.99/mo tier with a limit of 50,000 saves per quarter (additional saves $0.01 each).
$2.99/mo is what gives you unlimited* saves to disk.
* C:// drive only. External drives are limited to 10,000 saves per period)
Contact sales for enterprise pricing
And even if computers didn’t exist, it still would make no sense to assume every single person is competent 100% of the time… at any company. Human beings are fallible, and that has to be factored in.
I was listening to Gergely Orosz’s podcast[1] on Bending Spoons and found out that Evernote’s codebase was a complete mess and beyond repair.
[1]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
I see just so much potential to it. It could be linkedIn profiles: Leader|Innovator|Enpooper . Enpoopies awards/badges on forums for questions or blogs like "How can/did we replace aging RabbitMQ setup with Kubernetes-Kafka-Cluster"
By that logic, do cloud companies need to factor storage costs into COGS? Most people don't store exactly 1TB when they get the 1TB plan, and many don't use anywhere near that amount. Does that mean dropbox can pretend their offering has 100% margins? Sounds unlikely. The principle of accounting is that the numbers should reflect the actual business. Customer support costs don't have to be allocated to sales with 100% accuracy, but they can't pretend it doesn't impact unit economics either.
COGS is about me as a customer buying a widget, receiving a widget, and the seller having to have made me a widget. That's an incomplete view of a business, but incomplete views can still be very useful. Understanding customer support cost for example must be done over some time horizon, i.e. what's the 6 month post-purchase support cost, which means we don't know the cost for 6 months. COGS is known much faster.
As for whether it should include storage, or any other particular piece of technology, for a SaaS business, I guess that probably depends on the business. The important bit for accounting is the direct cost of providing the service. If you're renting out GPUs by the hour then clearly a GPU hour is a direct cost. If you're just hosting a web app and not selling any particular slice of infrastructure then that's probably not a direct cost. Fixed size plan storage is probably somewhere in the middle, although cloud storage is clearly a direct cost.
Still, my point is really that businesses should only use subscription pricing when there's ongoing COGS, because that's what people intuitively associate with ongoing value most of the time.
I started using Dropbox in high school and it has always “just worked”. I use the native app on Windows, iOS, and OSX. It’s essentially a virtual drive on all my devices and it backs up all my phone’s pictures and videos automatically. I can probably count on one hand the number of times Dropbox has annoyed me in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s overpriced, but at least it’s reliable. That’s worth a lot to me.
I experimented with Google drive as an alternative in college. It worked pretty well on android devices, but there was just enough friction on other OS’s that I abandoned it as a general file system. My g drive is basically just a graveyard of Google docs that I will never care to organize and random gmail attachments that ended up there for whatever reason.
Onedrive is by far the last choice I would make. My only experiences with it are (1) when Microsoft tries to force it on me/upsell me when I’m using office on my personal desktop or (2) when an employer uses it as their approved file sharing system. In my experience, it is consistently the least reliable of the three solutions. While Dropbox “just works”, I fully expect Onedrive to “just make me restart my computer, sign out and back in again, give up and just share the thing through slack.”
Again, just my experience.
I use OneDrive all of the time and it’s one of the three cloud backup solutions I have for Photos - Google Drive and iCloud being the other two.
But my Mom is one of the six users and my wife is another one and they use Word and Excel all of the time.
My mom is 80, a retired school teacher and has been using word processors and spreadsheets since we had AppleWorks for the Apple //e in the mid 80s.
I use Word to draft and submit board reports for two non-profit boards I am on. One, has followed the same format, except for typeface updates, since 1951. You can take the very first vice president's report from 70+ years ago, set mine next to it, and they look practically identical (except for the typeface). Using the Word template someone made 20-ish years ago is very handy. I assume that is when they eliminated the secretary's position whose job it was to type up the reports for all of the old men, which I am one of now. I fill it out, hit save, email a copy to the rest of the board, show up with two printed copies, and put one in the binder that has every monthly VP's report since July 1951 and use the second as a reference for when I give my verbal report. Easy peasy no cloud bullshit.
I am a volunteer watershed steward, a fire prevention educator, and a member of an amateur radio and an astrophotography club. I give presentations 1-4 times per year for all of those and all of them are done in powerpoint. Again, no cloud bullshit. My presentations are on my laptops and don't rely on hopping on someone's wifi or tethering to my phone in a cinderblock building with no service anyways.
Even onenote is fantastic but I think that's free. I'm using it right now to plan a trip with 8 other people. When in-country with no, or poor, cell service the local notebook will be synced and ready for reference. No cloud bullshit.
My main goal is to prevent data loss if a device is ever stolen / fails beyond repair. And being able to tell your non-technical family members to "put important documents within this folder" / "log in here if you need access outside your normal devices" is low enough of a barrier so that they actually do it.
It means you can put "Microsoft Partner" on your sales and marketing communications and some people will throw money at you just for having that on your shingle. In some cases businesses won't contract with anyone who doesn't have partner status.
And now they have to use another solution for file sharing?
The main alternative that we could budget for (since we're an F&B business in Vietnam and many options are too expensive) is the Google Workspace lowest tier. That only gives 30gb per user which is shared between email and everything else, so it's not that different really. We'd still have to be making sure people were not sharing huge files by email.
Are you really saying the difference between $6/month for the lowest tier that you said is affordable and $12/month for a shared 2TB pool of storage would break the bank?
All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together.
So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment.
They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix.
Private equity is an underrated danger to society.
So I call...
They "are having trouble" finding someone for "emergency service". Their idea of "emergency service" is "we have a company that will be out there in four WEEKS".
So I found someone who could come out that day, for a surcharge. Reasonable. And the AC was dead. But this company were nice - the tech said "no promises, no commitments" and he did some shifty magic and got it running for about six more hours before it was permanently to the graveyard.
So we started getting quotes for a new HVAC system.
Responses from the plan:
- we won't pay if you don't use our suppliers
- we won't pay if you don't choose from our list of models (which were all low end, 80%, 1 stage systems)
- even if you use our supplier, we won't pay above $X. If they quote you higher, the difference is on you.
- if you used another contractor for ANY maintenance work on the existing system, we won't pay
- if the maintenance schedule wasn't followed (whether you owned the system/property at the time), we won't pay
There's a common phrase in each of those statements.
So maybe the solution is to ask the electrician, etc, if you can contact them directly next time, and to ask them if they know any other tradespeople when you need one.
These are people who never had an exit opportunity before finally finding a way to sell their business for a nice lumpsum, instead of having to live job to job.
The only losers here are the customers and some of the employees, especially those who are undocumented.
“Verschlimmbesserung” is a great German word that describes “an attempted improvement that actually makes things worse”.
Basically, it's a Digitalisierungsschattenwucherbepreisungsskandal
https://www.stacksocial.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=offi...
Techspot has deals on Office 2024. https://www.techspot.com/news/96637-microsoft-office-lifetim...
How can you be sure they are bona fide Microsoft licenses?
That is fascinating to me
I have never used MS 365, but due to work have extensively used Google docs
It is awful. I am continually amazed at how awful it is
Astoundingly the most awful part is searching my docs. Compared to a directory tree of MD docs, it is simply dreadful. Oh Google, how the mighty have fallen!
MS 365 is worse than that?
As far as computer purchasing, my latest employer had my computer shipped directly from Apple. Once I got it, I installed the mandated MDM software.
You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s).
With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way...
With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is.
With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.
At some point your 0.2 becomes 0.3 and eventually crosses a threshold where it just makes sense to dedicate a resource for cost reasons.
Before that, they were running DOS on the client and Novell Netware on a server. Linux and “open source” has never been big in business.
I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.
IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals.
I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.
That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.
If it was a pure software startup we could have done without, but it was a semiconductor company.
I'll go out on a limb and just claim they're grey market. Someone can prove me wrong
This seems fairly low effort. I posted stacksocial because they've earned trust and are utilized for fundraising by a number of well known tech sites. I also have my own years of experience with them.
If you have years of different experience with stacksocial, please share that.
https://www.howtogeek.com/392080/cheap-windows-10-keys-do-th...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/143hze5/is_this_...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/can-i-...
Not legitimate in the slightest. If I contacted Microsoft they'd confirm them as an authorised reseller?
I'm not interested in your anecdote when the topic was whether they are bona fide licenses from Microsoft (pretty low effort to not stay on topic I must say)
Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web.
There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.
It’s the same with O365.
When evaluating options, I’ve learned to ask myself the question, ”how do I fix this if it breaks?” If my answer is, ”it won’t ever break”, I’ve learned it’s always a red flag that says I don’t understand enough about that solution to support it, because everything can (and will) break.
Users being stupid, using and holding it wrong, etc.
Just because you haven't had any bad experiences with Google, MS, Apple, etc doesn't mean it's a rosy world where everything works all the time.
As far as network/connectivity, how is that a Google problem if your office can’t connect to the internet?
It was fortunate that we were paying for the level where there was a separate way for discovery lawyers to suck out all your files, as that was the only way I found to get them back.
The other issue with gsuite is the file ownership model means that by default files are owned by an individual and can end up being lost after they leave. Transferring ownership is some kind of weird batch job that can fail and need to be retried.
If you have a company on O365 and don’t ever need IT support, you either have a very very small company or are living the dream surrounded by unicorns.
Something is broken at least every day or two and I’m on a full MS stack. Hopefully we manage to dump Teams in the near future and this’ll hopefully get significantly better. Teams is the bulk of the issues.
Last year we had Mac users start to report "when I attach a file, it looks like it's sent, but then recipient never sees it, and sent-emails doesn't show it either!" It got worse and worse.
This is kind of a problem in a business that sends and reviews a lot of documents. I spent two months on countless calls with MS, repeatedly capturing videos they requested, etc.
Finally, I happened to come across an advisory that hey, Outlook for Mac is broken, and will "eat" attachments. Dated a week before we started to see the problem. Firstly, it took them MONTHS to get it resolved as it required significant updates to Exchange. Secondly, in all the interactions I had to have with their support team: they had NO IDEA. Worse than useless.
What has broken about using any of o365?
Microsoft’s assumption is that businesses are using 365, and so both the number of features and the various paths to trouble tend reflect that.
To the random business owner, dropping them into anything other than Microsoft Admin Center is akin to dropping a tier one helpdesk agent into the AWS Management Console with no guidance. The trick is once you’re beyond a handful of employees you typically need to work beyond the MS Admin Center. If you want to do anything remotely sophisticated with identities, deploy SSO, etc, you need to be working from the Azure or (duplicative) Entra portals. If you want to do something like route helpdesk email, you need to be in the Exchange Admin Center. Tweaking spam filters is in yet another portal (currently Security Center, although that has changed a few times). And so on. Not to mention the more esoteric features that are only available behind Graph API calls.
I used to administer Google Workspace environments too, and while that control panel is MUCH more friendly, it’s still exceedingly easy for a non-technical person following a random walkthrough online to foul up their environment. I’ve watched that happened first hand many times.
In my experience Cloud provider reliability is about the same as self-hosting. They claim to have super reliable uptime, and it's hard to see history, but they regularly have small outages in various regions, areas, etc.
In real world anecdata I've had our Google stuff stop working more often than some of my stuff, though my stuff is very stable and never changes, except relevant security updates, so it's not entirely a fair comparison. Also our stuff is running on over-sized hardware and can handle 2 node outages without issue. Since the hardware this stuff uses is on a 4hr support contract, it's very, very rare that even one node goes down for more than a day. Of course we pay a lot for that stability, on purpose.
I agree IF you use Chrome, then Google's browser compatibility issues are near zero. Not everyone uses Chrome.
It's not a Google problem, but it is still a USER problem someone has to manage and handle.
Clearly you have never done much if any end-user support.
Or flip it around. Your marketing is using Mailgun, and they just ran an expensive marketing campaign, but none of the emails are going out.
Or the marketing person says Mailgun sucks so they just send mass marketing emails from their work email and now your domain is on a blacklist.
An employee gets phished and their email sends out spam to all your vendors. Your main supplier blocks your domain until their IT can talk to your IT to confirm your IT has fixed the issue. ”we reset their password” isn’t going to cut it.
Your cybersecurity insurance renewal requires 2FA and geoblocking login attempts. Your office manager thinks they maybe figured it out, but now no one in your organization can login.
At the very least you need someone on retainer you can call. The cheapest option, if you can find one, is finding an IT consulting company that works on a time & materials basis. That way you aren’t paying continually but you’re not dead in the water when something breaks.
"I can't save outside of onedrive"
"My mails aren't getting delivered"
"My office suite has deactivated itself and won't reactivate"
"We need a shared mailbox for x,y,z"
"The new joiner can't access my onedrive/shared drive" (No groups/auto-groups - they require some more advanced administration or discipline).
"I received an email from someone impersonating the CEO asking for an invoice to be paid immediately"
"My Excel sheet is somehow not syncing to onedrive and now there's conflicts"
FD: We don't use Teams, and we migrated from o365 to GSuite, but there are some people who remain on o365 for Office reasons.
And Teams. Everything. My personal favourite is document format screw ups (‘corruption’ might be the right word) depending on which Word was used (app, browser, Teams Word). It’s such a shit product. Document footer problems and page numbering issues are a complete waste of my time.
Spending the first 10 minutes of every call trying to get sound working for everyone. Hey Teams, don’t switch what mic you are using.
Excel has some funk around keeping shared files in sync. We set up one spreadsheet where I have read only access so I don’t accidentally delete anything. Turns out when I do make a change, excel creates a locally cached version and stops syncing changes. That took a couple hours of screwing around to figure out, and the solution was to duplicate the spreadsheet with a new name and delete the old one.
because the CEO/founder's card has a limit.
we had this ~10 years ago where I was also the aforementioned IT guy for on-offboarding, doing whatever needs to be done for marketing, to set one more TXT record, to add one more email alias, to host one more PDF file, and so on.
because this is typical when you are at the size that you have a lot of SaaS subscriptions and you need to manage them, but still way too small to have institutional muscle memory (with semi-dedicated long-hauler folks, proper enterprise accounts with good separation of concerns/controls).
A lot of the HR stuff ironically can also be handled by a PEO for small businesses.
While your employer as far as hiring, firing, internal management is your actual company. As far as health benefits and payroll taxes you are “co employed” by the PEO
IME not a big difference vs 99% of the failures of business IT systems in general...