This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever. The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.
> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.
The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
There's no substance to this comment. It's pure speculation. If you actually want to look at evidence, look at the recent news that Microsoft has cut AI sales targets in half.
> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
Ironic that you posted this as a comment on HN.
It’s not ironic at all. Posting here was deliberate to highlight the bubble that happens here for consumer products. This comment section has a lot of people evaluating these price hikes as if they were targeted at HN individual users, not for a product targeted at a different audiences and corporate subscriptions.
Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market.
Remember when Dropbox was launched and the top comment was doubting its utility because they could replicate it with rsync and other commands duct taped together? That level of disconnectedness with the market is common in every thread about consumer products.
As for AI demand: If you don’t think AI is in demand, you haven’t been looking at the explosive adoption of AI tools from ChatGPT to Sora (consistently high on app charts) by consumers. These products are in high demand, though you’d never know if it your only perspective was through upvoted HN stories and comments.
Yeah, the demand is there, but I have a hard time believing nontechnical people are clamoring for Copilot, they likely don't even know such a thing exists. The market is insane right now.
So they had used ChatGPT enough to recognize that you were using a different tool?
I don’t see this as contradicting anything. Even the nontechnical people in your life are familiar with these tools because they’re using them.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, we can be out of touch a lot of the time, but I kind of hate that this has become the "smoking gun" to dismiss comments on Hacker News. Yes, one person was wrong about Dropbox and said that they could just use an FTP server. Yes, people on here agreed with that person. Yes, sometimes our ability to do things low level blinds us to the fact that the majority of people can't or simply don't want to.
That said, most of the negative feedback people get for these things is actually good feedback, and most of the time when people say a project can be accomplished by doing XYZ, that's usually a valid point. Technical people can absolutely be out of touch (and I'm probably worse than average about it), but that doesn't automatically mean that a comment on HN is invalid or useless.
While saying "no one wants" the AI features might be a bit of hyperbole, I don't think it's super out of touch, and this is evidenced by the fact that a lot of the VC money for AI ventures is drying up. AI is neat and here to stay, but I think a large chunk of society is coming to terms with the fact that it's not nearly as cool as it was promised to us, and getting a little annoyed with how much AI crap is being thrown at us. YouTube is getting filled with low-effort AI video and AI voice and AI script bullshit, the average web page is turning a tinge of yellow from all the AI generated images that seem to be all over the place, searching is getting almost as bad as it was in 2005 when "SEO" became a thing because of all the AI generated blogs designed to steal clicks. None of this stuff is relegated to the technical crowd, this is stuff even normies have to deal with.
And within the scope of HN, I'm sure all of us are getting a little tired of having to review pull requests with huge chunks of clearly-AI-generated code that the writer doesn't really and are large enough to not be realistically reviewable with a lot of shitty, low-effort code.
There are alternatives for consumers but enterprise isn't going to screw around with those.
Which customers? Some enterprise customers want AI, others restrict its use. Other want integration with something other than Copilot.
So a 16% hike when current US inflation is 3-4%?
When was the last price hike? Looking at historical inflation and working backwards, you only need to start at around late 2021 to get 16% cumulative inflation. In other words if they didn't raise their prices for 4 years, they'd be at par with inflation.
edit: another commenter mentioned the last price hike was around 4 years ago, so it's indeed in line with inflation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192356
All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
1) Will they budge on renewal rates?
2) Does an alternative vendor exist?
3) Is the increase reasonable compared to the cost of switching to an alternative?
4) Do we anticipate future price increases, and if so, how can we prepare ourselves to consider a switch in the future?
Don't ask me, ask the person who posed the question of inflation in the first place. That said...
>All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:
All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way. Inflation affects everything in the economy, so a company that doesn't raise prices in line with it is losing money. Even SaaS businesses with low marginal costs aren't exempt, because they still need to pay salaries for developers and support staff, both of which roughly track inflation. Therefore if business see price hikes that raise with inflation, they can assume that competitors will raise prices as well, and it's not going to be worth switching unless they're already on the fence for some other reason.
Only if you assert that all prices move together at the same velocity.
It's usually a reasonable thing to assert, when the economy isn't in a complete revolution. And it's a really bad premise right now.
No business is really going to care about $1.00/user, especially when it costs hundreds of dollars per user (or thousands) to migrate entirely away from the Microsoft ecosystem.
Or that this was for business accounts that were already cheap? $1/seat isn’t going to cause a mass migration off the platform.
Or that some of the price hikes were 0%?
Fixating on this lowest price increase is deliberately misleading.
You would also have to go back and calculate price increases over time to compare against inflation over time?
You're completely right about this. But how does the Venn diagram look for features between different Office versions and for customer needs? Another commenter here said that Office 98 is good enough for most users, and I have to agree.
What reason is there today for somebody to upgrade from a 10 or 15 year old version of Office? Is Copilot it?
I've managed a very information-intensive career so far without using MS Office. Apple's iWork software is perfectly fine. And I'm not avoiding Office out of any principle. If I needed or wanted it, I'd be happy to pay for it.
Collaborative editing
The average australian customer managed to get angry enough that the ACCC is working to force a slop free variant and a refund for everyone dark patterned into upgrading.
Except there are not really any competitors if you look at the whole package.
A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange.
The fact you get the big-four (Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint) thrown in is really just icing on the cake.
That's a negative.
I'm seeing a very common pattern of Google Workspace + Google Meet, Zoom seats for people who need to remotely control computers, and then Slack or ones of its competitors for chat.
- Its one package
- All the non-tech users already know Microsoft
- Most IT techies will be VERY familiar with Microsoft
- If you are migrating from on-Prem then it is highly likely you've got Exchange on-prem.
Look, I'm the last person to defend Microsoft. But if you are a Microsoft shop then it does, sadly, make a lot of sense to take a Microsoft sub.
Most places have Google Workspace now. It’s pervasive. Most also have Microsoft 365 in some form or another. People generally want GMail, not Exchange.
Syncing users between Zoom and Google is completely trivial as is automating onboarding and offboarding.
Paying 3 annual accounts is not much different than 1… and is a bonus if it leaves you the option to completely migrate off of on.
(Incidentally a pattern I’m seeing is a place has Google Workspace plus Zoom, and then employees buy their own copy of Microsoft 365.)
If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smaller orgs it might be easier, but those don't pay Microsoft as much anyways.
From a user point of view, there are tools that have similar features, some even better features. G-suite is the only platform i know of that unifies all the office productivity products like 365 does. But neither G-suite nor any other platform can be managed/policed as well as 365. At the end of the day, will Google behave any better than Microsoft anyways (cost or otherwise)? And it isn't just policing and management but securing all that precious data in there, Microsoft might not be great but lots of tech-debt has gone into securing it within that platform. A migration would be costly, justifying it with cost savings alone might be difficult.
At least in my workplace, people do their best to avoid using sharepoint and onedrive anyway.
I can see being resistant to change, haven't had issues with it (and have benefitted from the auto save quite a lot).
There are downsides to OneDrive. Topping the list is the risk of data loss. Every dev here has at least one story of OneDrive getting confused in a way that led to data loss (that's usually what got them to start avoiding using it). It can also be inconvenient and get in the way in more minor ways, such as causing path confusion with some applications.
The benefits, at least where I work, are pretty minimal. So, on the whole, people tend to keep their documents in unsynced folders. The only people I've talked to here that have anything positive to say about it are managers.
I've had some irritations with it, but overall having versioning has been a much bigger benefit than the hassle.
There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.
There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.
But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.
But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.
But where will the next generation be shifted to?
Launched to Europe after Canada? Then launched into Space?
It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.
That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.
What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?
Thanks
How people in companies really need the features of Word, Excel and PowerPoint?
I often see people using space to right align a date, the pros use tabs.
For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
In case you aren't aware, when they try to sneak Copilot onto your plan you can get rid of it by going to your plan management page and canceling. One of the offers they should offer to try to get you to stay is your old plan without Copilot.
Isn’t that only perpetual as long as the activation servers are up?
It has nothing to do with existing files/compatibility. Excel is unparalleled.
This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.
It's fine if you have a few formulas. As soon as you're busting out macros it's time to sunset the workbook and make an application. There's a lot of God Excel workbooks sitting around on share drives with no audibility or quality control.
But given that Excel is the second-best tool for everything, world runs on it.
And when you try to build systems to replace Excel for a specific task, you quickly learn how extremely powerful Excel is and how hard is to replace it and add value that customers would care about.
But many end users prefer dealing with bugs than with inflexible software that doesn’t understand all the different ways how real world is messy and hard to model.
I hate using Excel. But I 100% understand why world runs on it.
If you listed out all the things that Excel can do, we might find that the alternative is at 80% or so (just a number), with some additional things that Excel can't do. That 80% could be good enough to switch. It should not be looked at as "all or nothing", especially for every person or business.
More people should use and contribute to LibreOffice!
But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.
I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
When there is a significant difference, it needs to be shown what the equivalent is in the alternative. The jump can be a bit mitigated by education or information, but usually by only so much, where it's still seen as attractive.
But once you get used to those differences, (also, knowing that there are a handful of themes that can shorten the difference significantly) then it becomes a non-issue after less than 10 hours of use.
Speak for yourself. I see that LibreOffice's default UI is still a normal WIMP UI and this is a plus for me. I hated when MS Office switched to the ribbon in Office 2007.
"So you want to insert a row in a table? Great, just click on Table > Insert > Row... Oh well. Nevermind, just show me your screen and I'll hunt the functionality in that stupid ribbon."
We don't need less, but more, Office programs that respect GUI UI conventions.
It's self-hostable (and the community version is FOSS I think), and really useful in a way I find better than just a spreadsheet.
It's no good for importing complex excel things, but I've found it very useful for new work.
There's two more things excel is horrible at: choice of extension language and being able to graduate your spreadsheet into a real program. You fix the extension language by using something like web assembly on the back end, and probably bundle one or more compilers to go from $lang to web assembly in order to be user friendly. Lastly you fix the last problem by virtue of doing all of the above. The second two features won't draw in new users much, so they're less important in the short run but make it a lot more sticky.
I'm not in a place in life to put much free time into that project, and ideas are cheap ...
Looks like there was finally a OpenOffice release recently but that was after years of people complaining of security vulnerabilities not fixed in the release version.
Agreed that their actual products seem to work fine for almost everyone.
That was the moment I booted into windows for the first time in 4 months. I started up Power Point and sure enough SVGs are no problem.
2B row limit, connected, eliminates the Excel security risk because it's hosted.
Likely they'd charge more for it.
Nobody offers what Microsoft bundles here. From editors, to storage, to communication to identity to management.
And I say this as someone who hates dealing with Microsoft and their products.