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.
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...
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
You lose access to it. You’re cooked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
$ sudo pacman -S libreoffice
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.
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.
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
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.
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.
Only makes sense on an airgapped system that will never exchange files with the outside world.
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.
/s
More info on a ShowHN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
