Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion(consumerrights.wiki) |
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion(consumerrights.wiki) |
/s
More info on a ShowHN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
Why not both? I mean, if you leave your keys in your car and the window down, the car thief is definitely the one who should go to jail, but you're still an idiot.
I do agree that you have to be a special kind of stupid to take people to task for trusting Microsoft "perpetual" licenses while yourself trusting Google much more. I mean, just using Google in the first place is even dumber than buying the Microsoft license, but that's above and beyond the call.
Only makes sense on an airgapped system that will never exchange files with the outside world.
How do I do that?
This is exactly the sort of scenario where I do not feel bad at all tracking down an online crack that disables the certificate check.
That said, it is probably not in Microsoft's best interest for people to have a legitimate reason to discover how much easier life can be if you pirate software.
Presumably we’ll know soon if network firewalling the licensing server helps, but I expect it’ll just delay the intentional failure by a few months at best.
But microsoft's incompetence keeps a lot of people employed.
maybe i'll eventually get a settlement for my multiple Office Mac licenses that won't buy me a latte. what a joke.
note to self: never buy anything from MSFT ever again.
Never fails to impress how utterly Orwellian these big techs can be.
But it does reminds me of when Garmin GPS would make the storage filesystem limited to say, 3GB of read size, then offer "lifetime map updates" while knowing that in a few years the new map size will not be readable on old Garmin devices.
But I'm fun at parties, I swear :P
You sound like a shill trying to muddy the waters. It’s petty clear when they silently change their web pages to delete features sold that it’s quite deliberate or did they accidentally do that too? Do you have a direct or indirect relationship with microsoft perchance or just missed it in TFA maybe?
Look we're using encryption; you like that right? More encryption == more secure == your peers will attack you if you don't like it.
Now Microsoft says my Excel will never work again. I'm pissed. Time for an FTC complaint.
If Office 2019 got a zero day RCE just by opening a Word documents, the optics would be tremendously bad for Microsoft and they had to patch it, which cost money and time. We're on a day where zero day can be found using AI, and it's getting better at it every iterations. No, saying that it is EOL and "yeah not my problem" wouldn't fly at their scale, just see XP and how long they have to extend the support period
I'm not saying "but think of the multi-billion dollar company", I'm sure they can support it indefinitely, I'm just not sure if doing that is a good use of engineer's time
Like, they're up there with crypto companies in the category of "This outcome was so inevitable that if you didn't expect it, maybe you should consider finding a legal guardian"
Any "big enough" organisation will eventually do something stupid, disgraceful, or even illegal. Once you have over a hundred thousand staff, there's just no way to guarantee that they all row in the same direction and nobody gives in to the temptation to cut corners or outright cheat.
If you think you can judge the entire rest of an organisation by a few bad actors within it, you'll be perpetually disappointed.
Microsoft Office?? LibreOffice is opensource, has everything from Word to PowerPoint, it is free, and just works.
Microsoft Windows?? Linux is free, the majority of folks use their Windows PC to Watch Netlix, YouTube, social media, write a thing or two.
Distro Linux such as Mint Cinnamon is lightweight, fast, stable, I can use it to 3D design, 3D print, coding, video edition, playing, you name it, it all just works.
The main problem I see is folks following hype like CachyOS, Ubuntu (dead dsitro harvesting users data), Arch, then have bad experience and blame Linux.
You do not need Microsoft in 2026, full stop.
Unfortunately this kind of thing will continue since Microsoft can survive any slap on the wrist that might come their way for their sleazy practices. They've done it countless times throughout their existence. It has been paying off enough for them to keep doing it.
Exactly. As such I no longer consider them accountable when they do this kind of thing. It's the buyers' fault for not voting for better with their wallets, and I have 0 sympathy for them.
No reason to keep using them. Literally none.
I have been a happy exclusive only user of OO/LibeOffice since 2004. Some times I needed to use MSOffice for a paper. It was always problematic.
I haven't use VS since 2007. I migrated to gcc. Never had a problem.
SQLServer? Only for demo and at work just to pull or save data. Postgres always saved the day. Windows Media Player? MPClassic or VLC worked fine.
There maybe other alternatives I use without knowing. Always without problems.
It’s about software preservation and abiding by the implied expectations at the time of sale.
We do as a community.
Many open source Windows deserve preservation. Even if they are abandoned.
But blobs? No way.
The point would not be so much to help the customers but to cause the actual cost to Microsoft to be sufficiently high as to disincentivize corrupt behavior.
What would a reasonable person expect out of the transaction?
Which promises and verbiage in the marketing material contradict the EULA?
You lose access to it. You’re cooked.
perpetual has pejorative connotations and only started appearing in marketing speak when software rental became the new business model.
I personally get by just fine with the built in converter tools in Apple Pages and Keynote, they seem just as robust as the Microsoft counterpoints. To be fair, I don't have those super complex and advanced word processing needs.
Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.
...and I'd almost be willing to bet that, as usual, the cracked version will remain perfectly functional.
https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/ad-specs/alexa-disp...
Similar to Google adding ads to the Android TV home screens after purchase too.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-tv-star-wars-coca-co...
Class action lawsuits usually end up with settlements where the offender pays much less than the harm they caused, and those harmed get almost nothing. Even if it does go all the way to a court verdict, the sentence is usually insufficient. And the process is long and expensive.
I don't really know what the solution is, but the current system clearly isn't working. And I don't think it was really designed for the scale of mega corporations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers.
Yep. It's difficult to say that the folks in the country are free when they often have to surrender their right to access the courts to get jobs, health insurance, medical care, access to telecommunications, shelter, delivery services, bill-payment services, etc, etc, etc, and obligate themselves to arbitration that nearly always gags both parties.
AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion was a monstrous decision. Arbitration was always an option. If you have to force people to choose the dispute resolution option you claim is cheaper [0] and fairer, odds are good that it's neither of those things.
[0] Remember when -IIRC- Doordash plead with Federal court to permit it to move its mass arbitration into court because the arbitration was too expensive (and how they got their ass kicked out of court)? Remember how like a month later, all the arbitration companies magically got a "We will handle no more than twenty complaining parties at once. All yall bitches got to get in line." clause in their rules governing mass arbitration? Yea, "good" times.
That said, EULAs are also often written in ways that are unenforceable. Just because a company says they get something doesn’t mean the law agrees.
Does the judge in my small claims case give a shit about the EULA if the defendant fails to show up?
So, no.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...
The ACCC is going to love this.
And, let's not forget, this is trillion dollar corporation. They could find one of their Mac devs to write an update for this in a week. The negative publicity from this is measured in millions of dollars.
(Right..?)
The change in the title of the post makes what happened much less clear. Interesting how that just chanced to happen. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
And Macs are bundled with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, all of which are excellent.
I had to install office after that
As a word processor, I like Writer even more than MS Word, but Calc, for example, is just much slower than MS Excel when you build a bit larger spreadsheets.
So from an ideological perspective, I agree, but you should know that there are some drawbacks / the products have different strengths.
(it's AGPL... there is an ongoing dispute with a fork now)
I wrote my CV in LO, to avoid my endless tinkering mode, that I had with my LaTeX CV, that still never looked exactly how I wanted it to look. Then 2 things happened:
I upgraded my desktop computer from Debian 12 to 13. Now LO can no longer start. I am only getting a crash without UI error, and on command line I get a nothing saying C++ error, saying "std::alloc bad alloc" or so, and that's it. No details, nothing. Already tried reinstalling a few things, including LO, but apparently it doesn't come with all it needs.
On my laptop, which is the same OS, Debian 13 LO still works, so at least I can edit my CV. However, there is another issue there. Scrolling takes approximately 1s, before the document is re-rendered. I found out I need to set an env var to make LO use XWayland compatibility layer, instead of using Wayland directly, because if it uses Wayland directly, it is just pure laaaag, unbearable scrolling experience.
Needed: Way better error messages, not just slinging low level C++ crap at me.
Needed: Why doesn't it recognize Wayland and perform properly when scrolling?? Or act through XWayland by itself, rather than me having to search for a solution for an hour? If the Wayland experience is that rough, maybe it should not use Wayland at all and use the XWayland instead from the start?
In short, a very bumpy experience recently. But once it works, which it still doesn't on my desktop PC, it is maybe the best word processor tool. Briefly I looked at OnlyOffice, thinking it is also free/libre software and maybe it is good, but alas it is a child's toy, when it comes to editing styles. Character styles don't even work properly, so it's an instant no-go for me.
Maybe I will investigate Calligra, which has been mentioned here.
EDIT: Tried Calligra. Couldn't even open the first fairly trivial odt document I tried: My CV. My CV document is basically just a few tables with text in them, one photo, bullet lists, some paragrah styles for headings and such, and some character styles to highlight words. The writer tool of Calligra instantly crashed, with no error message dialog whatsoever. It does have paragraph styles and character styles, but the font rendering looks weird, blurred as well and often users a way too small font in the styles editor. Aside from paragraph styles and character styles I didn't see any other styles in the styles editor though. What about list styles, table styles, page styles ... To me the writer tool of Calligra looks also very immature at this point. (version 1:25.04.2+dfsg-1, as shown in "Discover" on Debian 13, KDE)
EDIT: Maybe I will truly have to invest more time and create a good looking LaTeX CV. Or just be lazy and use something pre-made I find online. Though I already know there will be something that will not satisfy me or that is not anticipated by some pre-made template and then I will probably be fiddling with it again ...
Sure, better error messages could help, but when it no longer even starts...
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests...
After all, a computer with the date set to 2021 will still function...
They sold a perpetual product that broke in sync for every user, and the reason it is breaking is because of a license checking feature.
Not an easy case, but it could be argued they advertised a product as perpetual while it's effectively an X years license.
The fact that the breakage is related to the license might be relevant, you can stop supporting license checks, but do it to the benefit of users, not conveniently to their detriment as an upsale mechanism
I'm guessing that's the situation for several others though there could be other use cases that's Excel only.
Instead of pressing Microsoft, it would probably make sense to force such vendors (SAP, Oracle etc) to release their office add-ons for Libre office.
That'll kill two very profitable birds with one stone.
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
As an aside, have you seen Typst? It’s got LaTeX-level typesetting quality but the markup syntax is a lot friendlier (close to Markdown) and the scripting language is a Real Language™ with sensible error messages and sub-second compilation times even for big documents.
Why? Just to upgrade or what?
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.
They are responsible for awesome sales of MacBook Neo.
A small minority of buyers may be primarily buying the Neo to escape Windows; but I would argue that if someone is this sophisticated, then they would also be aware that Apple is slowly taking a similar enshittified path with MacOS.
(I've been using Microsoft since Windows 3.11, till Windows 10. Windows 11 was the last drop for me.)
My next mobile workstation will probably be an arm laptop with Linux for great battery life.
$ sudo pacman -S libreoffice
Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …
Buy yourself something nice every month with the money you save.
If a better storage deal comes along, I'll happily cancel.
I would occasionally see the standalone MS for Mac on sale for ~$30 and considered getting a copy just in case I needed it for some compatibility reason, but I just knew there was a catch. So I just kept running Libre. Glad I didn't waste the money.
Maybe deleting the updater will work? (as in https://osxdaily.com/2019/07/20/how-delete-microsoft-autoupd...)
Your Office has a license file - you could have bought it or pirated it, doesn't matter. This license file is signed by Microsoft, and Office determines if the signature is correct based on the certificate that is embedded in the Office instance. If the signature is correct, Office trusts the contents of the license file to determine what you can and cannot do.
Starting July 14th, the certificate itself that provides a public key for license signature verification will be no longer valid. So when Office will try to validate the license signature, it will no longer find any matching trusted certificate that is still valid, and conclude that it's not licensed anymore.
Indeed Microsoft can issue a newer certificate with an expiration date set in 2099s, but they wouldn't. So far pirates relied basically on an official method of activation (not a crack). Now we need an actual crack that would either make Office think its certificate didn't expire yet, or skip the signature verification altogether.
We need an actual crack that would patch out the license verification code or at least make it ignore the expiration date or at least make it think it's Jan 1st, 2026 for the whole eternity.
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
If Apple can release updates for ancient iOS versions to update certificates years after the fact, then these fucking assholes can do the same. The auto-update functionality is there. They are choosing not to use it.
Ok. Doesnt mean its not because of AI.
Does Anthropic use one or a few licenses to serve all office artifacts?
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.
I don’t think this is related at all.
AI is entirely unrelated. This is simply yet another push to get more SaaS subscribers.
I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.
This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeezing money out of the pockets of their users now.
It doesn't matter if some Microsoft trinkets are open sourced while AD is not and while you still can't connect your open source DNS and DHCP server to a Microsoft domain controller. Or have your open source email client be 100% compatible with the proprietary Exchange protocol.
I was genuinely puzzled by that, actually. I thought it quite obvious from the start that Nadella is no longer interested in Windows and other Microsoft software as products and will be moving them to thin cloud wrappers, but for some reason people were really optimistic about the "New Microsoft".
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
There has been some success. There is new legislation in California which has passed the Assembly. https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/22330/stop-killing-game...
And there is a citizens initiative in Europe which the the European Commission must respond to: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
I do want to nitpick on “unregulated free markets”. Because it’s almost an oxymoron. At least if one wants to rely on the theorems that prove free markets are best.
Those theorems assume a bit more than just a lack of regulation. They assume no information imbalance between parties. No ways outside of competition to keep out market entrants, and no collusion between market parties. All of those assumptions, in order to approach them in the real world, really require some strong regulation.
Hence I would argue that the problem isn’t just the growth curve flattening, but also a US (and EU) halt to Trust busting. Massive weakening of consumer protection agencies, and a general weakening of regulatory agencies by e.g. court cases.
It’s not just that we need stronger regulation because tech companies reached a point in their lifecycle where they wish to exploit more, as you so clearly argued. On top of that, regulatory power has been pulled back.
Just because alternatives exist for some people some of the time does not mean Office is worthless, or that buying it isn't rational.
(Though buying it starts to look a lot less rational when things like this happen.)
And of course companies like Microsoft or the car companies in your example have experimentally determined that the less transparent and immediate the product transaction is, the less likely some percent of their customer base will fully understand exactly what it is they are giving and receiving in turn from each of the companies that supposedly providing them value.
The answer is not to simply boycott, but to actively and aggressively punish companies for acting with this particular brand of capitalist maliciousness. It includes being vocal online but also pushing for more aggressive countermeasures against unchecked greed. Billionaire taxes, closing corporate tax loopholes, consumer protection, expanded antitrust, right to repair, labor rights. All of the policies that are “bad for business”. Because fuck them, policies that are good for business have only led to exploitation of the masses and we get nothing in return but more creative value extraction.
It’s past due we have sympathy for the corporate bottom line and time we start to get excited when companies bleed a little in the face of policies and regulations that absolutely do not care about corporate interest.
It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.
In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.
That's not an accident. In the last 1-2 decades, the largest generation in American history started retiring en masse. They didn't have enough children to replace them, because the birth rate peaked in 1965. This generation is now drawing off of retirement savings, the vast majority of which is backed by ownership in equities and bonds in publicly-traded companies.
When you don't have more people to provide value that includes a sale, like you say, and still have to increase value of equities and bonds every 90 days, you have to more intensely monetize each customer.
It's only going to get worse unless you bring a lot of people into the market as new potential customers, but you can only do so much of that without causing social disharmony.
This is how they've always behaved, and anyone who is surprised by this hasn't been paying attention for the last 30 years.
I'm surprised that going through the legal system is already seen as completely useless, but calling for a consumer mass boycott would totally work...
Every time I took a look at Windows once every few years it still reeked of shit.
A happy 10~ years ..until they bought GitHub. Then they crippled the Visual Studio Code Extensions Marketplace so VSCodium users couldn't easily install some extensions.
Coincidentally I was just in a YouTube rabbit hole of old operating systems and computing platforms in the 1980s and 90s and how Microsoft killed them with scummy tactics, like sending suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers and threatening to pull the Windows license if they even OFFERED users an OPTION for alternative OSes!
Fuck Microsoft. Bill Gates deserves a few more pies in his face.
I agree with you, but I think you've overestimating the level of technical sophistication of the typical Neo buyer.
> (I've been using Microsoft since Windows 3.11, till Windows 10. Windows 11 was the last drop for me.)
Kind of proves my point. I can think of plenty of people who use computers successfully every day who would unlikely to confidently state the name let alone the generation of their operating system, if asked.
Just by being on HN, you're probably multiple standard deviations from the mean.
Wish there was an open interface to use cloud storage, like a mount point, so Gmail or iPhotos could just write there rather than the hand carrying of data. But probably vendor lock-in is too compelling
I couldn't believe how many people sucked that shit up.
What looks like cancer to us looks like a massive reduction in operational risk to a CFO/CIO.
This is especially true if your core business has nothing to do with software or tech. Much easier to cut a check to Redmond. Microsoft is basically a utility company for enterprise now, it's commoditized IT. "Do what you do best, outsource the rest."
I don’t hate myself enough to have a Mac but I have an iPhone and there are so many bugs in apple supplied apps (mail, safari, iOS itself, iCloud) that apple have known about for years. And yet these bugs are still there with no desire from apple to fix them.
Apple has divisions for Design, Engineering, etc instead of divisions for products as is more normal. So sometime 20 years ago someone in the Design department designed a spreadsheet app, and they've been stuck with it ever since because Engineering isn't empowered to say to Design that this UI fucking sucks. Even though the app is otherwise regularly updated.
You see the same with Tahoe, when users report that they can't resize the window because the corner radius is so large that it excludes the hit box, Engineering does their best to move the hitbox, but they are not empowered to make the obvious fix which is to reduce the corner radius because that would be a UI change and those only go through waterfall.
They were selling it until October 2021, so it's not some ancient system. By building a time bomb into it, they misrepresented what was effectively a $50/year subscription as if it were a $229 purchase. Should be a slam dunk case, but it won't be.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
Bill Gates the ruthless business-nerd was definitely a stereotype 30 years ago, though to your point I don't remember anyone talking about them revoking licenses for purchased software.
People weren’t ready then. But enough “innovation” has happened since that most people will shrug and say “meh it’s an old version anyway”
Isn't this essentially what Claude Cowork is doing? AFAIK, it's running python in a VM and using stuff like xlxswriter, openpyxl, etc. at least it was last time I used it to generate some docs.
I've done that myself too when making some excel reports for management out of pandas data frames.
Is a layer of LLM going to make this better or worse? Could you train a model to be very good at it?
We should all know what happened when the US government turned on Colossus (D.F.Jones 1966) and it immediately found there was another. That collaboration was humanities near instant undoing.
To answer your second question, yes, I think it's inevitable that LLMs will become very proficient with all commonly used file formats.
I guess they used "binary blobs" in the broad FOSS-maintainer sense, e.g. bundled third-party assets, fonts, generated/minified JavaScript in sdkjs, and possibly precompiled mobile components...
However, onlyoffice removed their mobile editor repo from Github a few days ago, and EuroOffice has been particularly critical of the mobile apps, claiming they contained proprietary sections. So if there is a concrete concern behind the "binary blobs" accusation, the mobile side seems like the most likely place it was directed at.
It feels a bit like a mudslinging match right now and you were completely right to question the claim :-)
Consequently the best part of not buying Microsoft's shitty software is that it spares you from "having" to buy their (other) shitty software.
Microsoft used to build the best stuff. I'm not sure when that ended, I just remember the decline. I used to -jump- at release day for their latest OS version. Their dev tools were considered top tier and I used to like Word. Now every interaction I have with a MS product is painful and my trust in them is so far negative that I always assume the worst for every interaction. Wanna keep playing Minecraft without an MS account? We -promise- not to stop allowing you to do that after we buy it..... Want to use your computer without us advertising? Want to even use your computer without MS as a gatekeeper for your login? I have no idea why anyone would give them a dollar other than lock-in.
Microsoft has lots of crappy software, and I personally find MS Office rather irritating, but I'd still argue that it's the best office suite currently available. Like yes, it has lots of bugs and weird misfeatures, but all its competitors are either buggier or only have less than a tenth of the features that MS Office does.
10% of users with MacOS Office 2019 installs just got NERF'd by Microsoft. This story will not encourage users to spend more money on a disappearing rabbit trick. =3
It does not even have to be in a web UI or browser. Just somehow make it possible to easily connect and edit collaboratively. I know, I know, it is a huge ask, unfortunately.
LibreOffice Writer online was not popular, so it is understandable you assume it doesn't exist. There is also the trivial headless Linux remote desktop cloud hosting with 100% identical functionality.
>"edit at the same time"
Perhaps you meant: "View -> Toolbars -> Track Changes..."
Most documents that support OLE have difficulty handling concurrent writes. Office 365 abandoned desktop publishing in 2019, and replaced it with a web document management system.
Best workaround is every user imports each instanced changes: "File -> Merge Document."
And manually handle any collisions.
I would post how to setup your own remote collaborative environment on an $8/month host, but people seem like they are not interested. =3
"...run one instance of the software on your device (the licensed device), for use by one person at a time... In this agreement, “device” means a local hardware system (whether physical or virtual) with an internal storage device capable of running the software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a device. For purposes of this agreement, “device” does not include any hardware system (whether physical or virtual) on which the software is installed or accessed solely for remote use over a network.
this license does not give you any right to ... use the software as server software or to operate the device as a server; use the software to offer commercial hosting services; make the software available for simultaneous use by more than one user over a network; install the software on a server for remote access or use over a network; or install the software on a device for use only by remote users
This license allows you to install only one instance of the software for use on one device, whether that device is physical or virtual. If you want to use the software on more than one virtual device, you must obtain a separate license for each instance.
Microsoft may require you to activate the software over the Internet in order for you to use the software. ... The software may periodically and automatically reconnect to the Internet to confirm the license associated with the licensed device. If you do not reconnect your device to the Internet when required as part of the activation or reactivation process, the software may operate with reduced functionality.
We hope we never have a dispute, but if we do, you and we agree to try for 60 days, upon receipt of a Notice of Dispute, to resolve it informally. If we can’t, you and we agree to binding individual arbitration before the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury. ... Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, requests for public injunctions and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed."
https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/docume...
But the reason I think it’s better to think of it as forwards compatibility is that Microsoft gleefully used file formats as a means of driving the upgrade treadmill. Yes, the upgrade to Office 97 would keep everything working to approximately the same level of reliability you had already resigned yourself to — but by default, the files it kicked out would be unreadable in Office 95. There was Save As and an optional free converter… which tired 90s office workers didn’t know about, or particularly want to think about. In the age of literal floppy disks, the friction this created was a significant motivator for businesses to say “fuck it, fine.” Microsoft’s true genius has always been in knowing that “fuck it, fine” is the only bar they ever had to clear, and that through the power of lock-in and sheer institutional inertia, they can drive that bar deep into the belly of the Earth.
Thus, Azure.
I may be forced to use MS at work but at home I dont let their software past my router. A buddy of mine stayed for a few days while his place was being fixed. "Hey, why are my updates not happening?" "Oops, I forgot to tell you that all MS servers are inaccessible via the wifi."
Struggling to see anything but more risk with no benefit with this security posture.
Surely you jest.
US v Microsoft, the antitrust case, was decided in 1998. Microsoft has always been a shitty company run by shitty people doing shitty things.
They enjoyed a brief upwell in public relations during the period when they had first seemingly embraced open source with WSL, GitHub, and maybe dotnet core, but it was merely a blip.
Being overtly anti-consumer is baked into Microsoft's DNA. They'll always return to that baseline.
And for reselling you the same office suite every couple of years.
(Full disclosure, I worked there in the 2000s... So if anything I should be biased the other way.)
I have recently tried to use it, but couldn't find a way to open files from local computer in it. It showed me a fake filesystem and dragging and dropping files also didn't work.
I have not used another web browser LO thing, I think. If you are talking about another thing, do you have demo site/link?
> Perhaps you meant: "View -> Toolbars -> Track Changes..."
No, I mean a mode or so that is like online word processors like Google Docs, where you see the cursor of someone else, with their name, and can see them typing live, while you are also typing somewhere in the document. Unless "Track Changes" somehow enables connecting to someone else and seeing their actions concurrently, it is not what I am talking about. I really mean collaboratively editing a document, at the same time, seeing changes others make live, not merging afterwards (the git model).
https://en.libre-office.fr/article.php/free-online-libreoffi...
https://www.collaboraonline.com/
Drag and drop will depend on browser specific security policy. =3
MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.
VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.
> MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company
I'm pretty sure that all of those (aside from Xbox) are profitable on their own, so I don't think that them becoming independent would kneecap them at all.
Edit: s/he/they/woops sorry
Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.
Would it be better if most tools you use were proprietary, built by cottage industries? I doubt it. Especially if we notice that cottage industries tend to consolidate, and the few remaining players are rarely very community-oriented.
If the VAT amounted to $10,000,000,000 of tax revenue annually (something that is quite easy to do against an industry that has several trillion dollar corporations) that is enough to 100,000 open source projects with $100,000 grants.
This would literally unleash to much economic value that would be truly controlled by the public.
That is the future I want to build towards, anything that gives people more power against corporations and in the software world that means funding open source.
I can't think of a single open source dev that wouldn't mind a $100,000 grant for the likely millions they provide in economic value.
But if you need it:
Theia/Positron/VSCodium
For Python/Julia? Many alternatives. For C family? Similar Java/Go? Similar.
Well I had assumed that GitHub was profitable, since it used to be independent, and it feels like it should be profitable right now. But I tried Googling "is GitHub profitable" just now, and the first few results seem to suggest that either it's still losing money or that nobody knows. So I was likely incorrect about that point, sorry.
> considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users?
GitLab does the same thing, and they are definitely profitable [0], so that on its own isn't necessarily a barrier.
[0]: https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2026/GitLab-Reports-...
While each agency still gets the same whole of government pricing for the next five years, I worry the next step is to make each agency negotiate their own individual licences, which squeezes the smaller ones with no bargaining power.
[1]: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/fed-gov-faces-major-m365-lice...
Because of Microsoft's dominant position considering near ubiquitous penetration of Microsoft Office in government, one part of government will slap Microsoft on the wrist for anti-consumer practices, whilst other parts will still continue to purchase Office (and other products) because there simply isn't another product that competes directly feature-by-feature and compatibility (and usability in part), which matters in (often archaic) government processes.
It would cost far too much money to try to migrate away, at least at this point. Euro-Office[1] seems poised, if not likely, to dramatically shift that balance once it becomes a key part of EU government machinery.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to Euro-Office. If it takes off, it could invigorate other government efforts to fork Euro-Office and replace Microsoft's suite of tools. Someone just needs to put the business case to the relevant federal government stakeholders comparing the cost of (on-going) licensing vs. the cost of building an internal development team to maintain a fork for their whole-of-government machinery.
Given that there is a fair bit of EU and NATO overlap population-wise, if a significant portion of EU-based NATO countries adopt Euro-Office exclusively, I would suggest Euro-Office then poses an existential threat to Microsoft Office, and perhaps Microsoft's business productivity pursuits.
The moat that software companies had back in the 90s and 2000s before the Internet really took off, was distributing software by physical media. The Internet (as much as I have nostalgia for physical media) completely obliterated that model for mass-distribution productivity software, and indeed many others.
I'm certainly keen to give Euro-Office a test run, since the code is freely available (on GitHub too, ironically[2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro-Office [2] https://github.com/Euro-Office
You don't need to imagine it: the comment you are replying to links to a press release from a Government agency "going after Microsoft". And yet somehow we haven't seen Microsoft stop doing business with the Australian government.
People keep saying this but so far as I can tell, thinking you're above the law and punishing customers who don't like your company's behavior is a viable business model.
Story doesn't check out.
This type of action would be like Trump in Iran “I am do much more powerful than you, so submit or suffer the consequences” can trivially backfire, and really reduces the effectiveness of your power.
I wonder why Microsoft has so many defenders here.
Also, the change in the title of the post makes what happened much less clear. Interesting how that just chanced to happen as well. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
VSCode is a binary product and therefore it is dangerous.
I, along with every other person in tech I know, would love to start a company but the biggest risk is lack of health insurance; which is why things like medicare for all are sorely needed if we want to improve the space by introducing more competition.
Which is why you also need to specifically tax companies like MSFT to publicly subsidize alternatives.
I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers? Why should economic value both be dictated and captured by a small set of people? I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.
> I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers?
I don't think a lack of developers is holding them back. They just don't appeal to most people because they run in a terminal or are vim/emacs-focused.
> I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.
You'd likely end up with the same result. That grant money would come from a finite pool of money, how much money do you think would go to editors targeting niche users vs. editors with broad appeal?