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-...
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?
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.
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?
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.
