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Comment by quantumwannabe | Hacker News Reader

They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year.

Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.

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> the last pre-subscription version

Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

They're routinely cheap on Groupon as well, often under $30.https://www.groupon.com/deals/world-office-standard-2024

Not that I want to encourage people to keep using Microsoft products.

I want viable alternatives too. But Microsoft's stuff accounts for a million+ edge cases that you don't really encounter until you're neck deep into whatever you're working on.

For the sake of conversation, though, there's SoftMaker Office:

https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

But they're a subscription too. You save only $20 a year for less features than Office 365 as well (especially the lack of an email program). For most people, that savings and "no Microsoft" isn't enough.

> LibreOffice

No.

About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again.

I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".

I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).

Are you sure it still offers perpetual licenses? Because I just checked the Toonboom site and didn't see any.

Maybe you got in before they enshittified too :)?

Looks like you are correct: https://www.reddit.com/r/ToonBoomHarmony/comments/1ktuhtv/to...

Glad I snagged it when I did (though admittedly it was probably a bad impulse purchase since I don't really animate much anymore).

People still appear to use Flash these days by downloading an old version and getting a license key from Reddit/YouTube/etc.

I didn't really want to resort to piracy; I think it's stupid that Adobe won't sell a perpetual license.

I got a license to Moho from a Humble Bundle like a year ago, and I think Toonz is open source nowadays, all in addition to the ToonBoom copy I have so I probably don't need the real Adobe Animate anymore.

The pace has probably slowed down, but problem isn't so much that they're not adding anything, it's that the additions are either somewhat niche (e.g., new Excel formulas), don't work as well as they should (e.g., syncing), or are confusing (e.g., the new Outlook that lives alongside "classic" Outlook).

Multiple people being able to edit the same file simultaneously with no or minimal issues is pretty bug, though…

It generally doesn't work though. There are usually huge delays to the point of it being unusable.

Can confirm as someone who was using pre-subscription Office to write/read files while everyone else at work was using the 365 version. Now that I'm using 365 too, I do however appreciate the ability to do shared live editing in the office programs.

> 2013, the last pre-subscription version

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.

I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.

There have been huge changes and improvements in Excel

now I wanna try running office 2013 in wine

running a VM just for occasional office use is annoying to deal with

edit: activation is probs the main issue

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