Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

consumerrights.wiki

1,015 pointsantipurist376 comments

This change would go against multiple consumer guarantees in Australia where it's 1) a right to have undisturbed possession of a product 2) products must be fit for the advertised purpose https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-servic... Microsoft would be breaking consumer law if the change goes ahead for the perpetual licenses they sold in Australia

And this won't be their first time breaking Australian Consumer Law... Twelve months ago no less!

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...

The ACCC is going to love this.

Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.

They're working on it, they've recently stopped allowing the Australian government to be treated a single customer. [1]

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...

Microsoft's key customers aren't consumers, its business and government: specifically enterprise licensing agreements. If Microsoft seriously upset business and governments, they wouldn't be profitable, if in business at all, not long after that.

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

> Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft

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.

Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to make money. I don't know what kind of weird projection power fantasy roleplaying is going on in your head, but Microsoft is not going to cut off Australia even if they are made to honour this petty little clause that will not actually cost them anything. And even if it did, it wouldn't really matter. It's a relationship of convenience. A country can figure out an alternative if it really mattered, MS is not integral in any way, using it is just the path of least resistance. Something like ASML embargoing a country would actually be a threat, but Microsoft is very replaceable.

Microsoft themselves won’t do that. They are already under severe scrutiny internationally for fear of the US using Microsoft as leverage. They don’t want to stoke those fears. Once they do something like this, everyone who has been saying “stick with Microsoft services, they are the cheapest option compared to doing it ourselves, and have the lowest business continuity risk” will lose that argument at the same time. That creates a massive and clear opportunity for credible competitors to rise up.

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.

Microsoft wouldn't do that, because it would drive away other customers too. Maybe Australia would fold or maybe they would tough it out, but most other nations (and companies!) would start thinking about how quickly they could transition away from Microsoft.

Interesting how this has generated such negative response.

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.

Also, it's Office 2019, but they were officially selling it until the end of 2021, and third-party sellers were selling through their boxed inventory for years after too. So, this isn't even that old a piece of software.

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.

Presumably copilot could do it in record time.

(Right..?)

Yes, that's what i don't understand.

Original title: Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed offline products

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.

Been using LibreOffice for years. Everyone should. If we don't vote with our choices companies like Microsoft will keep pushing the envelope until you have to pay a monthly fee to turn on your own computer.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

Other options include Calligra (especially on KDE) https://calligra.org

And Macs are bundled with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, all of which are excellent.

Numbers is not excellent. It’s stubborn and unhelpful.

Apple should make their finance department use Numbers, it would be fixed in no time. I swear nobody at that company has ever opened Numbers, I don't understand how it can be so broken for so long.

I love the Calligra user interface compared to Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. It feels like it exposes features and information well in the way the best KDE apps always have.

Mac office suite is moving to the subscription model, too

Are you referring to Apple Creator Studio?

https://www.apple.com/apple-creator-studio/

Yes, some features now require a subscription - it's clear where this is going

Same. There is literally nothing I need from Microsoft Office that I can't do just fine in Libre Office. Happier to be using free open source software too.

Libre Office is fine standalone but as soon as you have to exchange files with other businesses you are often pretty much forced to use MS Office. Sad but true.

Just because they don't know how to use a computer well, doesn't mean you can't teach them.

Most use PDF for exchanges anyway, as there is no guarantee the receiver system has all the document components/features used to author content.

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

This is true up until the point where someone sends you a crappy old version of a word document that breaks when you load it in Libre Office.

I had to install office after that

I have been using it for a while as well (started with OpenOffice). However, not all apps can keep up the pace.

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.

OnlyOffice is better than LibreOffice for people who want a more direct alternative to Microsoft Office

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

(it's AGPL... there is an ongoing dispute with a fork now)

The fork is called EuroOffice and will be released next month. Onlyoffice is from Russian developers and includes binary blobs, it's not fully open source.

What blobs?

I dug a bit deeper after you asked because "compiled or obfuscated code blobs" was the wording from EuroOffice. It doesn't seem like they shipped binary objects hidden inside the editor source tree after a quick glance.

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 :-)

Russian developers, really ? Thanks for mentioning, I will download it and try it out, because there is nothing wrong with anything that is originated in Russia or made by Russian people.

I tried it just a few days ago, and I can't recommend OnlyOffice. Well, I am not an MS Word user, but I think even MS Word, at least the desktop apps, used to support styles better. What I mean is naming and defining various types of styles, paragraph styles, character styles, table styles, etc. OnlyOffice basically has no character styles that work properly. What you can find online about how to do character styles are hacks for using paragraph styles in such a way that they become character styles. But they are still mixed up with paragraph styles at the top style selection bar thingy. Of course this is an area where LO excels, above and beyond MS products. But I have come to expect what LO can do in terms of styles as the baseline. If a word processor can't even give me those style type choices, it is a child's toy, for writing actually well made documents.

In general, I also am a LO fan, but recently it left me hanging quite a bit.

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 ...

Sounds more like a problem with the Debian upgrade.

Sure, better error messages could help, but when it no longer even starts...

I believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0]

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...

Is it me or are people too eager to "one track mind" everything into AI? If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft, even in a world without AI.

"literally no one would be surprised" Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility. For the proposition that once you have purchased one of their products, you didn't have to maintain any further relationship with the company. This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.

That’s not how it worked. They were indeed awesome at backwards compatibility, but the proposition was NOT some principled mindset about long term ownership. It was that upgrading wouldn’t break what you have, overcoming a major sales objection. I think the proposition is better understood as one about FORWARDS compatibility — Windows was (and is) a brittle, poorly architected mess, and so the idea that anything built on it would stay working as the platform evolved was clearly insane and developers would never be able to keep up, so Microsoft absorbed much of the cost. This was actually something they did quite well — a good analogy here might be the heroic response the USSR had to the Chernobyl catastrophe, in which they skillfully managed a disaster whose scope was possible only through a long tradition of poor decisions — and this deserves recognition.

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.

Yup. Evil is gonna evil.

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."

Lol, Microsoft has always had sunset periods. They just weren’t great at remote licensing. They would have totally disabled old versions if they could much earlier.

>This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.

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.

Adobe was really the pioneer for that.

> Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility

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.)

No. It was not normal. I knew people who still had their original office 97 media installing it on windows 10, like a few years ago.

This, I've used old versions that I got as part of a site license for employees deal for years.

>If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft

Ok. Doesnt mean its not because of AI.

Does Anthropic use one or a few licenses to serve all office artifacts?

This is a bizarrely revisionist take. Perhaps you weren't around at the time but that was not standard MO in the slightest. Obviously they were incredibly scummy in other ways, but that was not one of them.

//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 suppose it depends on what kind of users you have in mind; enthusiasts, versus average users. Before they became outright user-hostile they were known for their anti-competitive behavior and buggy products. People were calling them "Micro$oft" by the 90s, at the latest. And United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation started in '98.

In the mid-90s, when I started my career, I was convinced (and very sad) that Microsoft had won the computing business and I was doomed to work on their software the rest of my life.

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.

Counterpoint: Bill Gates' appearance in the Simpsons clearly depicts him as a nefarious bully. I think the Windows XP and the Gates Foundation actually resuscitated his image a bit. Windows was a bit hit or miss. Blue Screen of Death plagued Windows 98, Windows ME was a joke, even early XP wasn't great. (I personally wasn't a fan of XP when it came out, switching instead to Windows NT before moving over to Linux c. 2004.)

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.

> 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”

I don’t think Office 2019 for Mac is what AI labs would use for this.

I don’t think this is related at all.

> Windows and Android versions of Office are not affected by the certificate expiry.

Extremely unlikely. Automating Office (the desktop application suite) simply does not scale. It's not needed, either. Libraries exist that can extract information from Office documents (both legacy and OOXML) much faster. Many(!) orders of magnitude faster, in fact.

AI is entirely unrelated. This is simply yet another push to get more SaaS subscribers.

That's their problem that they're trying to make my problem.

I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.

These are single-machine licenses. I doubt thousands of agents can run on a single machine.

They can only use it to run a particular tool related to a piece of MSO software. This may be a relatively short operation, a relatively small part of an agent's activity. Then hundreds of agents can use a single machine with MSO, similarly to how hundreds of CI/CD workers can collectively use a single machine dedicated e.g. to providing secrets and signing binaries.

Thousands of agents could remote into one strong enough machine, or even use DCOM.

Unless you snapshot a VM and run clones of it.

How do you define a single machine?

The answer is far more comprehensive than I imagined.

"...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...

One OS instance.

...on a Mac?

Yeah that makes no sense. Those AI are not running macOS instances to make you a docx. If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.

> If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.

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.

Microsoft's own different versions of Office can't always reliably read/write docx between them.

Is a layer of LLM going to make this better or worse? Could you train a model to be very good at it?

This shouldn't be legal. The software was clearly marketed as a classic fixed-in-time release, like the old CD releases, that would not be updated but would work indefinitely. Now they're going to boldly revoke the licenses???

It’s more malicious than that, they’re simply not renewing their code signing license hence making the software non-functional.

Which probably allows them to skirt legal liability...

After all, a computer with the date set to 2021 will still function...

Until they shut down the server, which will almost certainly be soon after the certificate expires.

Yep. Scummy, even for Microsoft. Too bad their EULA blocks class action.

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.

I don't think this can be the case given that the program will keep working in reduced functionality mode. This wouldn't be possible in the situation you describe.

Legality has long since lost literally any meaning to megacorps and the ultra-wealthy pretty much everywhere. Doesn't matter what country they're breaking the laws in. The only penalty will be a paltry slap on the wrist fine (if even) and they will continue doing whatever they want. I mean, it's just the cost of doing business, isn't it?

Penalties should scale based on net worth.

And at a certain net worth the the scale becomes so large, the penalty for fucking up should be an hour/day in prison with no bail or parole for every person negatively affected.

I don't know if illegal, but it can be breach of contract, microsoft can say "oopsie, sorry, our bad" or fight it in court.

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

It's definitely not legal in my country (Australia)

When the pirated version is truer to the original contract than the official version. What a time to be alive.

When buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing.

Could be as little as a one-byte difference to patch out the expiry check.

Damn, you could create an illegal number by sharing an offset+value.

Or indeed an illegal LLM prompt: "/goal locate and patch out the licensing check"

Sometimes one bit.

If not for the fact that some commercial software addons work only in Excel I'll be using only Libreoffice for everything. In fact that's the only major thing that's stopping me from totally abandoning Windows for Linux as well.

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.

Which commercial Excel addons do you depend on currently?

Vena is one of the most popular enterprise budgeting/forecasting packages. It ships as a new-style Excel extension making Excel the UI for department heads contributing to a rolled up enterprise budget

Not me but my customers so that affects me as well. Mainly Oracle

When I read "degrades functionality" I thought it was going to be some minor cloud-related feature, but holy shit they're disabling the ability to save files?? That article headline is really underselling it.

This is the new way and we need to stop it now. Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software. Block them. This is what is wrong with cars too. Don't want to give them real time data on you and your passengers and instead try to disconnect the modem? Well, no car functionality for you even if it doesn't need it. -get mad- Stop taking it. Microsoft is the enemy and needs to be treated that way. Same with any tech company that does the bait and switch TOS world. I buy so little software now and it is hard, but unless we stop this now it will only get worse.

> Microsoft is the enemy

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.

Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.

That's why anything that goes against the long-established corporate culture aren't likely to stay around for long.

Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry 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 and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.

A lot of developers (and thereby most on HN, I guess) see Microsoft only from the perspective of a private consumer. From the perspective of a normal non-technical company though, Microsoft is this giant that has spread its products throughout your organisation like a cancer and you can never free yourself from it. For Microsoft's main business it's irrelevant if VSCode is mostly open source or not. That is why these gestures never meant anything in the first place.

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.

There's also business value in "good enough" that Microsoft satisfies for enterprises. You get a lot of stuff "for free" with something like an E5 license: EDR, DLP, MDM, a full cloud IAM system, and a ton of cross app magic for the lowest common denominator of non-technical employees that you just aren't going to get without spending considerable developer effort to piece together a stack yourself.

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 think Microsoft stopped being the "darling" in 1994 when they got sued by Stacker and had to pay $120 million for stealing their source code and using it in their own product.

They're open-sourcing things either because they get no value from them anymore, or just want more unpaid "community" labour.

OK well that's the whole "open source" model. It's not some Microsoft perversion of it. The reason they moved from "free software" to "open source" was specifically rejecting the ideological stuff that would prevent business exploitation

> I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL

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".

I remember going to Linuxfest NW some years ago. Microsoft had a big booth there... "MICROSOFT <3 LINUX"

I couldn't believe how many people sucked that shit up.

This has been happening with Video Games for a while. There is a major initiative called "Stop Killing Games" which was triggered when Ubisoft bricked "The Crew" when servers were shutdown.

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...

It's good legislation. I would love to see this extended to "Stop Killing Software" in general, with the same provisions.

Hopefully SKG can serve as a precedent to help consumer rights expand.

This is much worse. The Crew was always framed as an 'always online' game, even if that was technically a farce. This would be more like if Bethesda rolled out an update to cripple Skyrim after releasing a new Elder Scrolls game to lackluster sales.

If you consider that profit is a function of price and cost, and price is a function of scarcity (i.e. demand relative to supply), then over time, logic dictates that a strategy of profit maximization will work to create scarcity as soon as the profit curve plateaus. In economic orthodoxy, the only defense against this is the hope that there is more than one supplier and that they will remain adversarial, which is not an equilibrium state if you consider that a strategy of cooperative pricing and supply curtailment can at times maximize profits more effectively than competitive oversupply. Perhaps we've been judging the benefits of unregulated free markets based solely on our observations of the first half of the profit curve. Perhaps we're now seeing many of the world's markets moving to the latter half.

This is a rather strong analysis. And especially the point on behaviour change once market growth plateaus was new to me. Thanks!

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.

Agreed. I would define a market as a mutual social contract that favours voluntary estimation of resource value, and exchange thereof, over violent competition for resources. Such a contact must necessarily be enforced, since voluntary compliance among humans is never 100%. So yes, some form of regulation is built into the very definition of a free market. I'm fond of saying that, as rules approach zero, competition approaches war.

You didn't start using libreoffice.org like 15 years ago?

I did. SunOffice, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice. It still isn't very good, though.

Recent year or two LibreOffice has improved greatly as far as the UX goes and I haven't had to use Word/Excel in decades. When I have to use it for work I use the online app and office online apps are also garbage, especially compared to Google Docs / Sheets stability and performance.

I think you mean "StarOffice" which later forked into OpenOffice, then LibreOffice.

There is OnlyOffice

Most companies didn't, no.

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.)

Most Microsoft purchases at a large organization are rational only because of how much the company has already sunk into Microsoft. Microsoft's strategy had never been centered on their software succeeding on its intrinsic merits.

Consequently the best part of not buying Microsoft's shitty software is that it spares you from "having" to buy their (other) shitty software.

Hard agree. In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.

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.

> but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value

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.

> In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.

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.

100%. One of my crazy ideas (but a good one) is to invite all of pakistan to america in order to fix it all

No, I think we do need legal protection. We have so many high quality protections when it comes to real-world items -- they could be better, but if companies are going to move everything on line, and put tech in everything, they can goddamn give us the same level of protections.

As this is only a problem for people/companies who have willingly decided to be customers of Microsoft, I'm having a hard time getting outraged over this.

This is how they've always behaved, and anyone who is surprised by this hasn't been paying attention for the last 30 years.

> Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software.

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...

I think it's a vanishingly small number of consumers buying Office compared to businesses.

"Their lawyers will win" is plainly wrong assumption if something is clearly illegal.

Sadly that only works when all parties agree on the "clearly" part. They will lose, but only if you can endure years of squabbling in court and have unlimited funds for your legal team to prove that the aforementioned clearly really is clear. More likely they'll bleed you dry and force a settlement with an NDA bolt on. For a company like MS, pissing a few million down the drain on making life hell for litigants turns into a sound investment: no one looks at it and thinks "I want what they're having". This is where you would ideally have a government-backed consumer rights agency step in and take up the battle.

Yeah. But it seems unlikely that that's the caes here.

I never used anything by Microsoft since I bailed to Macs after Windows 8.. and with Nintendo, PlayStation and CrossOver etc for games I never even felt the need to.

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.

Bill Gates also deserves a criminal investigation into what he did on Pedo Island.

I agree. Take what ya can, give nothing back!

I gave you an upvote. How many downvotes did you get?

I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005. That is four mac computers total and I assume ~$600 in office licenses over 21 years. Not a ton of money but not zero.

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.

All power to you!

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.

Use libreoffice, its good for the occasions you need actual office software instead of latex

Agreed, and before the naysayers start chiming in, I wrote my whole dissertation in LibreOffice Writer without any issues. LibreOffice is fine. My one and only gripe is that the resume templates are sorely lacking, but that's a community issue, not a software one.

Same, though technically I started it on OpenOffice before LO was a thing. Sent material back and forth with supervisors who all used Word, etc. just fine too, and LO has only improved in the past few years.

>I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005.

Why? Just to upgrade or what?

Yes, just to keep a current version in the decade. My first repurchase was either because moving from powerPC to Intel compatibility or wanting docx files with a big Office shift.

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.

How quickly certs went from "securing your software" to "securing our business model".

It was never about security. '"Secure" boot' is older than this and was the same trick, they would ideally not allow you to boot anything that wasn't signed by them. It is already very frustrating that you have to go out of your way to enter the UEFI and disable it. For everyone but the technical user, their goal is already accomplished.

The best company to do Microsoft in is Microsoft.

They are responsible for awesome sales of MacBook Neo.

As the old adage goes, "the day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners"

But a vacuum cleaner that doesn't suck... still sucks.

This is so true! I've never seen a software company more disgusting than MS.

I disagree. I suspect the vast majority of Neo sales are simply driven by the ability to get Apple-quality laptop hardware for such a low price. As such, the people driving the Neo sales are competing manufacturers who offer cheap nasty plastic underpowered Windows laptops around that price point.

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 think you severely underestimate the power of Copilot. It's the absolute worst thing for windows.

(I've been using Microsoft since Windows 3.11, till Windows 10. Windows 11 was the last drop for me.)

> I think you severely underestimate the power of Copilot. It's the absolute worst thing for windows.

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.

I would buy a Neo to escape Windows but it's not like macOS is a pleasant experience either.

My next mobile workstation will probably be an arm laptop with Linux for great battery life.

MS hates him! Find out this one trick they don't want you to know!

$ sudo pacman -S libreoffice

Did Apple pay them to drop support to boost their revamped Numbers/Pages/Keynote suite (ClarisWorks Infitniy.0).

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 …

In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documents on my Mac, but security considerations prevent this now.

Switch to iWork and get a copy of LibreOffice whenever an old docx document looks funky in Pages.

Buy yourself something nice every month with the money you save.

The only reason I pay for M365 family is for the 1 TB per member storage. Excel is a bonus, and Word and Powerpoint are basically not needed any more.

If a better storage deal comes along, I'll happily cancel.

I agree the 1TB is a good deal. But our phones are Apple and our email is Google, so it’s all wonky sync via OneDrive (and when you have a lot of OneDrive the forced syncs to your windows login takes a lot of cache space).

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

This actually isn't that far-fetched, once Microsoft saw that the bundled competing suite went subscription, they were free to drop their "perpetual" support.

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.

People keep saying that Microsoft invested in Apple to defeat anti-trust measures. They did not. They lost the Video for Windows lawsuit (Apple v San Francisco Canyon Company, Microsoft, Intel). Buying the non-voting stock was part of the remedy. Microsoft would gladly become a monopoly if they could get away with it.

Sound like Microsoft's given me permission to make some binary patches to return functionality I already paid for, and to share it with my 7 billion closest friends. Cool.

Interesting that the deadline is checks notes one day before the Nightmare deadline. Definitely not a coincidence, right?

What’s the Nightmare deadline? I’m out of the loop on Microsoft news.

Microsoft mistreated a security researcher, the researcher publicly dumped a horde of Microsoft zero days, Microsoft was decidedly miffed, the researcher says they'll "shatter Microsoft's bones" on July 14.

Source: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/28/microsoft-0-...

The certificate was issued before the Nightmare Eclipse zero day thing started but I suppose it’s possible there are other certificates expiring around the same time that could be connected to the Nightmare deadline. Probably a coincidence though

It’s also the day before SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019 (both considered office products) fall out of support and have to be replaced by SharePoint subscription edition.

What's the nightmare deadline? I'm guessing it's October 14, but what happens then?

Time to get cracking I guess...

https://massgrave.dev/

Is that the right product though? I use office 2019 and that says to activate but mine's activated - I need something to stop the remotely bricking.

Maybe deleting the updater will work? (as in https://osxdaily.com/2019/07/20/how-delete-microsoft-autoupd...)

It won't help, sadly.

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.

Ironically my pirated copy of Office Mac will work perpetually. Arrr for the win.

If your pirated copy is using "serializer", you're actually using the official Microsoft's way of volume-activating Office, you just obtained it in a yarr-harr-harr way. So it will brick just like official copies would.

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.

Updater service has been disabled since day 1.

The last time I refreshed my Mac setup I didn't reinstall my standalone Microsoft Office, which I'd kept for the (very) occasional Word compatibility need.

Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.

Yarr, this be thievery.

You don't ask to talk to Microsoft representatives anymore, you invoke the code for the right of parley.

Aye, but the Pirates' Code is more what ye call guidelines than actual rules.

By the time you are made aware of it though, you are already part of the crew.

Fine, I'll continue with LibreOffice if Satya insists.

When did "hate the customer" become a thing?

Microsoft always hated their customers. And their competitors. And their suppliers too. The only people they don't hate really are their shareholders.

The phrase "there's a sucker born every minute" is well over two centuries old.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

Your satisfaction is your margin is their opportunity.

Look at generational C-suite shifts in Silicon Valley. Post the financial crisis, all regulatory efforts concentrated on banks and brokers for a decade, and tech firms were given a free rein. Boards apparently chose 'growth over anything else' types to lead.

When Google beat their antitrust suit

I’m shocked I say. Shocked.

Utterly flabbergasted

Well. Not that shocked.

I am impacted by this and am furious about it. Mostly because I'm reading about it here and not from, you know, Microsoft, of whom I am a customer.

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.

They have the nerve to degrade and call it now a view-only?!!! This is the reason why pirtacy is justified; it was a perpetual license. I hope Europe is watching and governments walk away

This should be treated as an organised crime syndicate stealing the purchase price from every customer.

They do this to Office 2021 routinely if your computer is offline more than about 30 days at a time. I run LittleSnitch to keep Microsoft blocked; my copy of Excel periodically goes into "read-only" mode. So I unblock Microsoft, let Excel talk to the license server, and then block Microsoft again.

Now Microsoft says my Excel will never work again. I'm pissed. Time for an FTC complaint.

I don't like the fact that a company can literally steal purchased product back from its users but I don't see how any company can realistically support a product for a long period of time, especially if it is a B2C perpetual license product

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

I genuinely don't understand why anyone would ever make a business transaction with Microsoft.

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"

Hundreds of millions of businesses (and individuals) transacted $83 billion to Microsoft just last quarter, so clearly they're doing something right.

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.

Yet not as disappointed as the people who actually believed Microsoft would give them a perpetual license for something just because they paid for it.

They provided some good products. I use Office 2019 daily and I used Windows for a decade or two. They do seem to have become more cash grabby in recent years.

Okay, things were different back then but right now you only use Microsoft products if you agree to never own it.

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.

Well, technically they never said the products would continue to function with the same functionality. But also this is Micro$oft, and I would've thought people would know by now that do only what's in their own interest.

It's entirely reasonable to expect the basic functionality of document and spreadsheet editors to edit documents and spreadsheets. If an editor no longer can edit, it's no longer functional. Microsoft seems to know this which is why they removed the "continue to function" clause from their end-of-support page.

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.

> They've done it countless times throughout their existence.

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.

Techically, the OS should be able to isolate an application -- stop it being modified, and put it into 'Groundhog day' mode (at midnight, the date seen by the application rolls back to the previous day). This would 'keep' Office for Mac, won't it? The only loss would be the smart tag and functions that insert or refer to the current date in Word or Excel documents.

Don't forget, this is the same company that is killing Publisher with no true alternative to open existing .pub files. At least they aren't planning to rip Publisher away from perpetually-licensed users (yet).

I have a purchased copy of Office 2013 and they can pry it off my cold dead hands.

If you only need to keep Office around to occasionally edit a file while preserving formatting, there’s now another option in 2026 - get a coding agent to do it for you. I’ve had Codex make substantial edits to financial model spreadsheets a few times, and it knows enough about how to modify office XML files to do that work correctly. Occasionally Excel didn’t like some of the files at first, but the view-only version of Office for Mac works well enough to allow Codex to discover and fix any incompatibility. Between agents and LibreOffice, no need for Office anymore.

There are many open source alternatives/upgrades to M$$$ products.

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.

I think you are missing the point.

It’s about software preservation and abiding by the implied expectations at the time of sale.

M$$$ and other companies don't give a damn for software preservation.

We do as a community.

Many open source Windows deserve preservation. Even if they are abandoned.

But blobs? No way.

This could be class action worthy..

Ah, sadly the license forbids that, or even individual suit. Only arbitration.

Isn't that itself challenge-able?

That’s essentially equivalent for claims like this. File an arbitration claim. Let Microsoft pay. If even a few thousand customers do this, it’s about as painful as a class action lawsuit, which anyway gets eaten up mostly by legal costs.

I would encourage affected customers to go to small claims court. You’ll probably get a default judgment. Small claims court was created for just this type of issue.

IMO it would be better if there was a general mechanism to prevent profiting from corrupt business practices. For example, a court could determine how much money Microsoft made by selling perpetual licenses that turned out to be a lie, add interest, add a 50% penalty, and require Microsoft to pay all of that into a trust to be collected by any customers harmed.

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.

The general mechanism is lawsuits; in this case class action lawsuits.

And this mechanism is pretty ineffective.

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.

You can do class action litigation, but that takes years and the lawyers collect 30-50% of any settlement. The economics for customers don't make sense.

Right. And IMO it works poorly. It’s extremely common to see a settlement such that the company still ends up ahead on its problematic behavior.

The Office 2024 license quoted in comment [1] says that "class action lawsuits ... aren't allowed" (but only if you live in US). Truly free country where you a free to even waive your right to sue.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341968

Not even as a deterrence?

But you most likely signed a binding arbitration clause in the TOS

Same result and then Microsoft would be paying for arbitration

Did I sign anything? EULAs aren’t necessarily 100% enforceable.

What would a reasonable person expect out of the transaction?

Which promises and verbiage in the marketing material contradict the EULA?

But they’ve got you. Nobody uses Microsoft office turdware unless they’re locked in and have to.

You lose access to it. You’re cooked.

If you’re cooked because of Microsoft’s willful destruction of property, that just means it’s not a small claim anymore.

I actually have a retiree in mind to whom I’ll have to recommend LibreOffice https://libreoffice.org

You’re right, I’m sure nobody’s made any kind of mass activation scripts that you could find online and get a better experience than paying customers.

In Australia, the ACCC. They made Apple change their warranties.

There is a reason why EU is leaving Microsoft ecosystem...

But isn't Satya supposed to be the second coming of MSFT if you listen to all the pods....

Louis Rossmann's video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRnno9VIZx0

s/perpetual/permanent

perpetual has pejorative connotations and only started appearing in marketing speak when software rental became the new business model.

I haven't read California's "Stop Killing Games" bill but I wonder how close this comes up against it or similar laws?

I am so glad that I am not forced to use Office. I know for some that they can't escape, but I would hope your workplace would cover it if so.

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.

After Stop Killing Games [0] has been doing some big steps forward lately, plus movement in the same vein has been showing up in California, we now need to start working on a more general Stop Killing Software act.

[0]: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

It's clear they don't want stand-alone Office anymore. One gets the feeling, given how Windows has devolved, that they'd like to rid themselves of all desktop software so they can focus on the backroom, perhaps because the data they could acquire is tastier.

Everyone got real loud when Windows 10 was killed off. And it happened anyway. I expect the same will happen this time, as do Microsoft.

Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.

Companies might need Microsoft, but why are people panicking who could replace ms office with other office suites? Why aren’t they abandoning Microsoft products? From office suites to windows?

If digital purchases are not ownership then piracy isn't stealing.

Microsoft 365 apps use a digital certificate to validate licensing. The certificate currently in use expires on July 13, 2026.

...and I'd almost be willing to bet that, as usual, the cracked version will remain perfectly functional.

I also don’t love how if you have a microsoft account, it will immediatley convert your perpetually licensed products into office 365 products and force you to reinstall.

What's with these companies? Netflix and Amazon Prime shoving ads despite charging people. Everywhere you see there's the greed to extract more and more.

Adding ads to Echo Show devices after purchase was a bold move and they seem to have gotten away with it.

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...

I don’t understand why anyone would continue to use an EOL version of Office.

Only makes sense on an airgapped system that will never exchange files with the outside world.

I guess that means they are fine with users ignoring their rights too? Just crack their software until something better comes along?

You can always trust Microslop to screw you over despite any past promises to the contrary.

Anyone who has paid any $ to MS in the last 25 years will get exactly what they deserve.

Explains why sites like stackcommerce have been selling discounted keys for Office.

So, do I just disable updates?

How do I do that?

No, the problem is the software has an internal certificate that is about to expire.

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.

As described, the licensing system will fail you into readonly locally unless you subscribe Office Clippy 365, buy Office 2024, apply Office 2021 updates, or (not listed) apply third-party licensing cracks for Office 2019.

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.

Presumably this will happen to Offica 2021 in two years, too, so it's actually worse than you say.

Possibly, yes?

Meanwhile 2016 is still working fine…. Until Rosetta support is dropped.

More users for LibreOffice.

Just a few days before the release of EuroOffice, what a timing.

I should’ve pirated instead of buying Office 2021..

wow ... this has got to be illegal, right, right ??

This is why TXT and MD and RTF exist. This is why CSV exists. This is (some of) why some governments are moving away from this junk.

But microsoft's incompetence keeps a lot of people employed.

class action lawsuit?

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.

Just use LibreOffice or other better tools like TeX instead of a WYSIWYG editor. With AI it is easier than ever to port existing documents, even if you have to OCR the original.

The problem is when your counterparty sends and expects MSO documents with latest advanced features.

This is software I paid for specifically because I didn’t want a subscription. If I wanted to use Libreoffice instead, I would have.

> By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed.

Never fails to impress how utterly Orwellian these big techs can be.

If you’re still using Microsoft products at this point it’s your own damn fault. They have been doing this shit for years… decades.

The forced restarts pushed me over the edge; I dropped MS in 2021

Another situation in which the fragility of CA TLS creates finite and very short software lifetimes. No software that uses CA TLS can say their applications "will continue to function". But Microsoft did and that's on them.

you're acting like this wasn't intentional

Maybe it wasn't which is worse, meaning Microsoft despite being in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world can't even get these basic details right. I think assuming this was intentional is actually giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt tbh.

do you like, not understand how capitalism does to tech

I don't mean to imply it isn't. I wouldn't be surpised. I just have no evidence of such. CA TLS is messy and pretty much impossible to get right even over medium timescales.

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.

“ the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed”

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?

the faux outrage is maddening; you knew they were snakes when you bought the product and you bought it anyway

Because there is not a full replacement for the product. Come on. Don't be deliberately obtuse.

another tick in the "never ever have a partnership with Microsoft" column...

Remember when we used to revoke corporate charters for anti-social behavior?

I’m trying to build SmallDocs, a new markdown first browser based document format (mainly for ease of use by agents): https://sdocs.dev

More info on a ShowHN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633

[flagged]

Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stop blaming the users when it's literally the company that's violating the contract/agreement (and potentially violating the law). Superiority complex about your proposed solution is ridiculous because Google can and will close down your account for any reason they see fit and you'll lose all your Google docs you made since 2015 (and more). It wouldn't be the first.

> Stop blaming the users when it's literally the company that's violating the contract/agreement (and potentially violating the law).

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.

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