Can Microsoft Really Convince People To Subscribe To Software? 297
curtwoodward writes "For most consumers, monthly subscriptions are still something for magazines and cable TV. With Office 365, Microsoft is about to embark on a huge social experiment to see if they'll also pay that way for basic software. But in doing so, Microsoft has jacked up prices on its old fee structure to make subscriptions seem like a better deal. And that could really leave a bad impression with financially struggling consumers."
Why has the slashdot MS symbol changed? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe because Slashdot finally realizes that no one else in the world but hopeless Linux fanbois associate Gates with Microsoft for about the last five years.
Could Slashdot finally be ready to grow up? Let's hope so. Steps in the right direction was getting KDawson and CmdrTaco out of here, maybe this is a good next step to moving back to being a tech site and not a garbage dumb for raving lunatics with a chip on their shoulder.
Re:Why has the slashdot MS symbol changed? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, we want Borg Ballmer.
Re:Why has the slashdot MS symbol changed? (Score:5, Funny)
And we can replace Apple's logo with a generic law suit.
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I suggest we replace Bill's icon not with a generic suit, but with a chair.
As long as it's a flying chair, I'll second that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, everyone new Scully couldn't run Apple without Mulder... The OS-X Files... lovin' it...
Re:Why has the slashdot MS symbol changed? (Score:5, Funny)
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This is the "Businesses" icon, not the Microsoft one.
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Nah, it's all just relevence. Everyone still talks plenty of shit about Microsoft and Apple.
It's just that, nobody much cared if Apple was evil back when they were bankrupt. And people care less about Microsoft now that they've stagnated for a decade.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer [vanityfair.com]
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When they started suing people, thats when we cared. Cause and Effect.
I've said it before. (Score:5, Funny)
If you liked Microsoft Tax you're going to love Microsoft Rent.
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Indeed. MS has tried this before with their software assurance scheme, and the customers got burned.
The customer thinks "Oh, this way if there's an upgrade that year, I automatically get upgraded for free!"
MS thinks "Once I have you paying for software as a service, I don't need to push out upgrades as often to maintain my revenues."
Upgrades become a rebranding of the previous year's, with minor usability tweaks / new logos / icons. MS needs to go on a diet, and get its mojo back...sticking it in front of t
LibreOffice (Score:4, Informative)
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
What Microsoft really appears to fear is the fact that MS Office versions N-1,N-2, and often even N-3 also take care of everything most people need to do.
They aren't simply adding a subscription option, they are nontrivially bumping the price of the perpetual license options...
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I don't know what country you're from, Russia maybe, but I assume English is not your native language. In English, sentences end with a single dot, called a period.
Those three dots at the end of the sentence to which you are referring are called an ellipsis, you dolt. Look it up on Wikipedia, if you can figure out how to do so.
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LibreOffice is fine by itself, but it is not sufficiently compatible with MS products to allow you to share files in a MS dominated environment. I made several attempts over the years to get by with StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and just couldn't manage it - I wasted too much of my and my coworkers time dealing with file incompatibility issues.
Software is a strong natural monopoly and MS has a very strong position in the desktop office market. I don't blame them for trying to milk this position for a
Re:LibreOffice (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but how often do you need to share files in a mixed environment like that. I think a business that is currently MS Office will either stay with Office, or they will put one of the OO.org forks on every machine and internal sharing will just switch to ODF instead of OOXML and the old documents/templates will be converted/recreated and deprecated over time.
You only need to be able to share documents while you're collaboratively working on them. Once finished, they should be baked into PDF or paper anyway.
Re:LibreOffice (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just migrating the office suite, it's everything. At school every major piece of software I use (Matlab, MathCAD, & Solidworks) integrates with Excel. This means that to migrate away from MS Office I have to have all three of these programs work with the replacement. Good luck getting people to migrate until you have that compatibility. This does seem to be something that I don't see brought up all that often, and yes it is important.
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It is happening in both consumer, small business and enterprise. Many stats have the OO family around 18% marketshare.
Yes (Score:2)
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Find another 50m people who agree with you about being will to pay and talk to Microsoft.
Hopefully no (Score:5, Insightful)
Going back to the time-sharing days is not something most of us would like. The PC revolution was all about empowering the user, the subscription/cloud model is all about giving control back to big companies.
I hope it won't happen, but after seeing the queues to buy a overrated, expensive toy this Friday and assuming there are that many ready to part with their money in exchange for a locked system, I really don't expect it to fail. There are many that will trade freedom for (assumed) convenience too easily.
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When the PC revolution started getting PCs working was far more expensive and far more difficult than getting the developer SDK working on that expensive locked down toy. Maybe the people in line aren't the only ones you should be looking at regarding trading convenience for freedom.
Possibly (Score:3)
Why would a home user want Office? (Score:2, Insightful)
The last Microsoft Office product I bought was Word 97. I've been using OpenOffice, then LIbreOffice, since about 2002. It's a OK word processor, a mediocre but adequate spreadsheet, and a better draw program than Office. What's in Microsoft Office that a home user would need, let alone pay for monthly?
Re:Why would a home user want Office? (Score:5, Funny)
It's a OK word processor, a mediocre but adequate spreadsheet
With a shining endorsement like that, who wouldn't want to use it?
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Google Apps has an "OK" word processor and a "mediocre but adequate" spreadsheet, and both work well enough for most things I want to do with them.
LibreOffice is well beyond what 90% of business and home users need... except that the outside world demands all "interchangeable" documents to be in MS-only file formats.
Re:Why would a home user want Office? (Score:4, Insightful)
You might be surprised. Many people do more with their home computers than just Farmville and porn.
People volunteer for non-profit organizations, join the board of the PTA or their homeowners' assocation, start a small business, help with their kid's little league, work on a master's degree, and more.
Google Apps, Libre Office, and the other suites out there... like you said, are mediocre. Yes, you can write a letter and track your DVD collection. And it's also true that a ton of people barely use 5% of what Word, Excel, and the rest of Office can do.
But then you have this whole subset of "home users" who are professionals using Office at the home for more than just their shopping lists. They need the features (and ease of use, and support, and templates, and clip art, and and and) that Office offers. The features that they use when they're at work -- creating complex budgets, slideshows, long documents -- all get used at the home as well.
And so I don't buy the argument that Office doesn't have anything that a home user needs. Because for a lot of people, home users are doing a lot more than you're giving them credit for.
why subscribe again? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, my Office suite was purchased back in the latter half of 2000 (maybe first half of 2001, don't exactly remember). It still works fine, and I haven't spent a dime on it since then.
Back in the bad old days, when we were forever reaching for that next release of the OS or that next release of Word in the hopes that it would crash less often and we could actually get some work done, Microsoft built a business model based on expensive incremental releases (a similar game to what Apple is playing now with hardware) and we all went along with it because we needed something that worked.
To a certain extent, Microsoft is now a prisoner of their own success. For the great majority of users, Office stopped progressing over a decade ago, and Windows stopped progressing in 2002 (xp sp1). There is no longer any need to go out and buy every new version. Hasn't been for awhile.
The problem is, Microsoft relies on that new release income to function, and I'm sure they're worried. Now comes a new paradigm -- software rental -- that guarantees it. I'm sure that seemed like a great idea, and I'm sure the person who came up with the idea of jacking up the prices of their non-subscription products got a big ol' raise.
The thing is, there are fewer and fewer reasons to stick with Microsoft products, and more and more ways to migrate off them while maintaining backwards compatibility. If you stick with the mindset that "we are microsoft, and people will buy from us for that reason only", the strategy makes sense. But I wonder if the premise is true anymore. Personally, if and when I can't use my old crufty copy of Office anymore, I will actively seek one of the free solutions before allowing myself to be locked into a Microsoft solution. It's just self-preservation.
Re:why subscribe again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting idea - that the document applications are basically mature, and not much more is needed/desired on the part of users.
In a world like that, you would expect development of new office suits to slow, and the department sizes to shrink. Ongoing development for the trickle of new features and bugs that need to be corrected, but on a much smaller scale than originally. Same as with operating systems.
I think maybe it is unreasonable to assume that a company in an expanding market would forever grow or even never contract. Surely as computers become ubiquitous, the purchases will only be for replacements, which one would expect would be lower than the peak where new units and replacements were being purchased.
Re:why subscribe again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head. Office reached good-enough stability, and good-enough feature set, several years ago. They have more recently gotten into the "change for the sake of change" phase, and have been redoing GUI, etc, just to have something to promote with the product. Now imagine if customers like you and I (I'm using Office 2003 on my Windows 7 laptop - as my primary work machine has died and been replaced several times over the years, I've just moved my Office license along with me) didn't have the opportunity to have "bought" and owned Office a decade ago. Instead we had to pay a never-ending recurring fee. I think it's exactly users like us that Microsoft no longer makes money off of, and going with a subscription model is the only way they can try and prevent this from happening in the future.
Granted, they aren't going to get many of us in on this new scheme - we already demand a "fair" method of owning software licenses that have value in the long term future, and most of us will simply switch to other alternatives. However there is a new generation of users coming of age, who are more "plugged in" and used to things being connected to the "cloud", or totally web based, or software at least checking online for "updates" and "synchronizing" when it starts up. There are a large number of iOS / Android games which, even though they SHOULD be able to run happily 100% offline, will only function when they have network connectivity and the user is signed in. What this is doing is conditioning a new generation of software consumers to a new level of control, connectivity and oppressive DRM.
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I have to agree with you on the progression in Office - the feature set has been there since probably Office 97 for most of the apps, but 2003 for Outlook. While Office 2007 is a huge progression in UI (argument over backwards vs. forwards aside) it does not add much of anything functionally for me, with the exception perhaps being the mouse over menu popup and the context sensitive toolbars, which are significant as far as usability goes but don't necessarily add additional function.
However, I think you'v
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You should take a look at the last decade of server support for Office. Office as a product line is way, way ahead of where it was 10 years ago. You don't use those features though which means you probably should be dropping down from a premium office suite.
If you aren't a demanding user and thus aren't willing to pay much... why should Microsoft care if they lose you?
Cracks and Hacks will abound, and M$ will loose $! (Score:3, Insightful)
If such a scheme is introduced, it will cause/fuel a renewed proliferation of Crack and Hacks that will really cost M$ serious money in the long run.
Since older versions still abound, and I am quite confident that there are more than a few of us that will simply hold on to those versions until it is simply impossible to do so any more. By then, there will be a Free alternative, and M$ may have learned its lesson.
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Microsoft owns the OS. They can handle hacked versions of Office rather easily.
Sure (Score:2, Insightful)
As for folks liking FOSS, it's still there. If FOSS was that good*, MS would not sell as much as they do.
*I'm an old *nix guy. I ~do~ dig FOSS, when it's appropriate. Currently, MS Office is the defacto standard in the business world.
I know it's cool to gripe about MS and Bill Gates. I prefer to waste my time on other things. And, I've ~never
Removes their development incentive (Score:4, Interesting)
If they are already getting monthly/yearly fees from customers, what's the incentive to produce good products? Now we get to vote by not buying that version and continuing to use an old one. With this new model they'll get money either way.
Their hard core users will probably pay, but many people are occasional users. Free and/or cheaper products will make out big on this. Word processing and spreadsheets aren't exactly cutting edge applications anymore.
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Sure they are. There are wonderful BI features in spreadsheets today that didn't exist 10 years ago. There are wonderful multimedia and collaboration features in word processing that didn't exist 10 years ago. You just don't use those features. Which means you shouldn't be running a premium suite.
What a mess (Score:2)
As a long term MS user. I find this as a mistake. I don't like cloud computing BTW and i'll keep my stuff here at home not on someones server. Why should i pay someone to keep my files when i can do just as carefully here?
Maybe (Score:3)
Corporations will probably like it because many seem to prefer leasing or otherwise renting over buying.
Software Subscriptions and Circuit City Divx (Score:5, Interesting)
Office is deeply entrenched in the business world so this move could be a financial bonanza for Microsoft until the business world rebelled. Lotus Notes (Which IMNSHO sucks big green donkey dicks.) could replace Outlook and the Lotus suite of apps based on Open Office could replace the balance of Office. Courageous management would dump commercial software and go with Open Office or Libre Office.
Big challenges are user training and finding a replacement with the same kind of email and calendar integration that Outlook offers. I work for a large tech company. Being able to schedule meetings and conference calls, and getting reminders of same makes the work day flow smoothly. At least until your exchange server becomes unreachable.
We need a Darth Balmer icon for Slashdot.
Can you say Adobe? (Score:2)
Adobe started the "rent" thing a couple years ago. I guess it works IF you need to upgrade all the time. But if you feel you can skip an upgrade you're SOL.
Sure, as long as it's .... (Score:2)
Nothing new for some of us (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a personal technet subscription, which is effectively renting MS products (annual fee, access to latest software, and other goodies)
Work has enterprise licencing, which is not much different.
so... some of us have been renting MS software for years.
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I'd have though it was pretty obvious from the "About" section of the Technet site:
TechNet Subscriptions is a subscription program designed to help IT Professionals prepare for critical issues and plan for future deployments by providing them with fast and convenient access to the latest software for evaluation purposes
They get more legalese about it later, but basically; you get a licence to run up machines to create test deployments and test your code on, not to "use" at home or work.
The volume licensing twnth refers to as enterprise licensing is an entirely different beast, and a lot more expensive.
I know a lot of people use Technet as a cheap way to avoid activation hassles and installing warez that are full of back doors, but I thought
the only thing microsoft convinced me to do is (Score:2)
I'll be hated, but yes... (Score:2)
...unless I keep getting the $10 versions from work home use program (HUP). The problem with HUP is I can select (currently) either Office 2010 or Office 2011, but not both (just in case it's not obvious, the former is Windows, and the latter is Mac OS). And yes, I want and need both.
My company uses Windows workstations, but I prefer Mac OS at home. Most of the time, Office:Mac is just fine. Except, you know, the glaring omissions of Access and OneNote, which cause me to have to boot up Parallels (less of a
Great, more timebombs (Score:4, Interesting)
They convinced people to use their software (Score:2)
Considering what a pile of substandard trash things like Office are, that they still have not caught up with open standards and are lagging behind badly on the OS front, I would think that people are morons and MS marketing realizes that and knows how to play them well.
Therefore I predict this will be a huge commercial success.
I got Office 365 licences "for free" (Score:2)
I have a technet subscription (Score:3)
Despite having technet, I still use LibreOffice more than Office ... I have both installed but i kinda like the interface of LibreOffice more.
If I have friends / family that ask about this .... well technically whenever i have had friends /family complain about buying office i have just told them to try OpenOffice before then LibreOffice now. Most of them tried open/Libre office and decided it was pretty good ...and really good for free and just used that.
PDF Printer (Score:2)
Only makes sense for business, not home. (Score:2)
If you can write off the subscription cost in your business, then you can have some justification.
But for a home users? The vast majority would likely be happy with the office version they bought with their computer, and using on their next computer if they could. They need to upgrade just about never.
Getting roped into annual fees makes absolutely no sense in this case.
*Social* experiment? (Score:2)
MOLP (Score:2)
They have been on this sort of model for a long time with large customers.
Nothing really new.
But i do find it humorous as in the old days they were fighting against IBM's similar model with the big iron, and now we are coming full circle.
Guess it wasn't so bad after all :)
Not tablet users, no. (Score:2)
They should have released office applications for iOS at 2x the price of their iWork equivalents. Then they should have moved all that into the metro style, and released basically the same metro designs for Windows 8.
That might have cost them more than it produced in revenue, but now the result is that millions of people have been delightedly using their iPads for a couple years, and they're doing ok without MS Office. Even enterprise users. And MS still doesn't have an announced plan to bring Office to Met
tied to a machine (Score:2)
Consumers compare apples to apples. (Score:2)
But customers compare Microsoft's apples to Google's apples and apples from other vendors. The subscription based Ms-Office will live and die by its comparison to other subscription based document suites. Mainly google. Microsoft might bring in more backward compatibility with old office documents. ( on paper. In reality I find Ope
It's all about customer's perception (Score:2)
The trick to make it work is to offer the subscription at a really low price, for example, $5 per month.
And they can use upselling by providing online backups, for example at $10 per month.
This way, customers will think it's a great deal, because it adds real value.
However, I'm sure it won't work, for several reasons:
1) Microsoft will maintain their basic offer at $12.5 per month, which is too high. Come on, an Internet connection is cheap, and it's even more useful than Office !
2) most of the users don't r
everything old is new again (Score:3)
In the days before the personal computer revolution, all software* was by subscription. Companies and universities bought hardware form the IBMs, Honeywells, DECs, and Amdahls of the world, but then paid a subscription fee for support in the form of maintenance and upgrades.
Then the microcomputer came along, and there was no software for it at first, so people wrote what they needed. Some of it was good enough that people were willing to buy it, at retail, just like milk or bread. Some software vendors would support purchased software with upgrades, either free for a time or for small fees, but it wasn't subscription-based.
Microsoft was one of the biggest forces in the world of boxed retail software. Remember the Windows 95 midnight release?
A couple of decades or more later, and now Microsoft decides that the "pay forever" model of the giants it supplanted is the right path. While it is something of a regression to old ways, it's also an outgrowth of the absurd situation we've come to in copyright and licensing laws.
What other models are there now? Apple sells you the hardware (computer or phone) and you get the patches and minor updates for free, but they push you to upgrade your hardware relatively frequently -- iPhone 6 anyone? Ubuntu gives you the OS, but they have deals with corporate partners and will probably be pushing ads into the os soon. A number of vendors give you the software, upgrades, and source, but charge you for the kind of "call up somebody and get this fixed now" support that management likes.
The situation Microsoft is in may be unique, however, because they can no longer convince consumers -- or most corporations -- to get on the upgrade treadmill, thus they've lost their steady income stream. MS can't get their customers to cough up more money on a regular basis for the next version. Who can blame the customers when the difference between Office 2010 and Office 2013 is, well, what exactly is different, other than Metro? Why should anyone upgrade?
This inability to keep pumping their customers for additional money to upgrade is the main driving force behind the subscription model. With a copyright regime which increasingly says the user only "rents" the software, and declining revenue from the Office cash cow, Microsoft really has only once way out: charging you a monthly fee for the privilege of editing your letters and calculating your spreadsheets.
*footnote: except software you (the company, the university) wrote yourself.
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It is not free. You pay with your privacy.
Few consumers use open source. (Score:2)
Probably less than 5% of consumers use open source.
Re:Few consumers use open source. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Few consumers use open source. (Score:5, Informative)
On the contrary, I'd argue it's nearly impossible to use the Internet without interacting with open source software.
Netcraft now confirms: BSD dying... (Score:3)
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Consumers expect free - due to open source movement. That means we are headed to ad supported model which is BAD. I'd rather pay for my tech. I'll sign up.
Can't we just call it "CompuServe .Net"? You'd think that people had never heard of this business model before.
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:4, Interesting)
Consumers expect free - due to open source movement
What? Consumers generally think that anything that does not cost enormous amounts of money is not useful.
That means we are headed to ad supported model which is BAD.
We are not heading for an ad supported model; we already did that once, and it was a disaster. Remember the days when programs like BearShare would install malicious adware on your computer?
We are actually heading for something much worse than ad supported software: software as a service. You know, that thing where you have no control over your data, no control over your software, where you can be arbitrarily denied access to important documents for any reason or no reason, and where fees can be forced on you without warning. Ads will certainly appear in such software -- and probably will appear in addition to subscription fees (which is what you see on cable television).
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:5, Insightful)
You can use it until they 'upgrade' the format. At some point few enough people will be using the older formats that they become effectively unusable.
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. We are running up against this with Excel 2003. While with the compatibility pack it can open Excel 2007 and 2010 files, the newer features do not work rendering 2003 little better than a glorified viewer for some of the spreadsheets being sent to some of our staff.
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Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:4, Interesting)
...which covers about 95% of the users.
Not everyone should need to waste money on a Word Perfect wannabe just because some corporation managed to convince everyone that their file format is some kind of defacto standard.
It's about on par with everyone being expected to install a copy of the Oracle database.
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why businesses should push very hard to use nothing but open formats. Tying yourself to a single vendor for hardware or software is just asking for trouble. A company can abuse their customers much more if it's difficult to switch products.
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:4, Informative)
I would love nothing more, but my company is primarily a government contractor, and until the departments we deal with start using open formats, we are stuck. As it is, we are pretty much looking at buying licenses for the remaining Office 2003 installs by the end of this year. So far our Office 2007 workstations still seem capable of dealing with anything Office 2010 throws at us.
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If I ran the country (and I really think I should), government would be required to use an open format if one exists. Even if MS pulled slimy crap like they did with ISO, at least there would be a format there to use.
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You know a decade ago it seemed IE 6 was going to be the future forever as people hated change and websites optimized just for that one browser. Things did change though and finally forced MS to make an IE that doesn't suck and starts behaving like everyone.
Perhaps that can change with Office but right now Open/LibreOffice is not as good and there is no reason to change. Firefox was much quicker in version 1.5 Firebird than IE 6 and had new things like tabs. It still took nearly 4 to 5 years before people w
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:5, Insightful)
We need something faster and has more functionality than Office
"More functionality"? Office is a bloated pile of crap because of the excessive and redundant features. What used to be a pretty useful wordprocessor back about 1992, Word 5, is now so feature laden that hardly anyone uses or even knows a tenth of its features.
I edit books and authors send me files in Word. I have yet to see one -- whether a businessman, doctor, or university professor -- that knows what a Word "style" is. They one and all treat it like a typewriter. Few of them seem to be able to spellcheck.
The only reason anyone upgrades is because they have no choice when they buy, or they have to be able to read the file format. My daughter demanded I get it for that reason, as her teachers distribute files in various MS Office formats. I installed Ubuntu on her laptop and she now uses Libre Office. It works, it's free.
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Plenty of Free Software but that's not the point.
The OP was talking about FORMATS, not software. You're far to eager to engage in lame trolling to actually read what you're responding to.
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Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:4, Informative)
It's a WORD PROCESSOR. It's something that should have been a well understood problem 20 years ago. Never mind 9.
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Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, you are seriously confused.
I mean we hear constant screams about MSFT having too much cruft and backwards compatibility holding things back...
The screams about backwards compatibility holding things back must be in your head? I don't hear them.
I doubt very seriously you'd get anything but word salad if you tried to open the latest LO ODF files on OO.o 1.0
Your point is asinine. Why would anyone run an antique version of a free software suite when the newest version is only a download (or a free mailed CD) away?
Software gets new and nifty features, no-one says that this is a bad thing. Proprietary software houses, however, essentially run an upgrade racket driven by incompatible new formats. Some are worse than MS, Adobe, for instance, offers no way to save in older formats and sneakily "upgrades" older files when opened in a newer version. CS4 even did this without the user having saved the document. My brother, who uses a Macbook, constantly mailed me docx-files with schedules for conversion when in university as his professor refused to save in an older format, and the tables used didn't show up in free suites. When confronted about this, the professor wasn't even aware that this could be an issue, and he told my brother that he "didn't have time" for pandering to students on off-brand devices. Nobody wins but Microsoft in such a situation.
For OSS this is never an issue as upgrades are free. The problem is that proprietary software upgrades will always incur significant costs. If you can't even admit that this is a serious advantage of open source, and one that can even be decisive for certain users, you are deluded. It dawns on me that you are likely a strong fanboy or even a paid shill, in which case you will admit to no arguments against your loyalties, and my post is wasted.
The fact that they even gave you a compatibility pack at all was more than the other guys, so maybe if you need it that bad you might want to just pick up a copy of something from this decade, yes?
"More than the other guys?" How on Earth can you say that with a straight face? The "other guys" give you their whole fucking product for free... Yup, astroturfing confirmed.
Re: (Score:3)
hairyfeet is again to the Microsoft's rescue, insulting people who are smarter than him...
And there's more .... (Score:5, Insightful)
And considering how terms and conditions change on the fly, to lock myself into a subscription that can be turned off at anytime because I refused to go along with the new terms is just asinine.
As it is, my Office XP license is perfect for me, but already MS is playing games with that. I have a license that I bought in '02 and it worked fine for YEARS, then one day, MS sneaked in the Genuine something or another (that's what I get for being zealous about keeping my system up to date and continuously checking that my selection or unselection for the Genuine whatever STAYED uncbecked) and it still said it was OK. then one day for some reason, the Genuine fucker decided that NOW my license is illegitimate? WTF, MS?! - I get the pop-up and whatnot but I ignore it - fuck'em.
My point? I don't trust them - or ANY software vendor with a subscription. I think some of those people are working there because they were fired for ethics issues with the cable companies.
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:5, Insightful)
Only dirty open source hippies expect things to be free.
Consumers expect free. Not because of open source, because of the internet. Facebook is free, news is free, Google docs are free, everything is free.
Of course, businesses are willing to pay if it gives them a competitive advantage or improves the bottom line, and Microsoft makes most of their money from b2b sales. So the question is whether Microsoft can get them on a subscription basis.
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Re: (Score:2)
I don't see why not. Microsoft already gets lots of businesses on Software Assurance, which is just an insurance scam. And this would do away with an SA for Office licenses. I haven't done the math, but I bet it'll end up being a wash.
Adobe now does outright $50 subscriptions for Creative Suite. It's expensive, but not for a company that was used to buying multiple Adobe products per year, it can actually work out pretty nicely.
Paying a subscription for software is naturally abhorrent to me, but business
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Businesses have been on a subscription model for many years. Client access licenses and otehr things have time limits built in or you can pay annually and you get free upgrades too. Like what what they do for WIndows 7 Enteprise licenses that they use to downgrade back down to XP.
It is practically free (as in paid for already) but they keep old around. Smaller businesses have leases and use clouds as well. To them they need monthly costs in line for lines of credit and to make good reports for partners and
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's hard to believe that people, and especially businesses, will actually fall for this scam.
Actually the subscription thing is primarily driven by businesses, not consumers.
If you need to install 5000 computers you could be looking at 5 million dollars in cash outlays just for software licences. And as other people point out, when you need to upgrade you need to upgrade a lot of your IT, that can be 5 million dollars all at once. With a subscription cost it makes your expenses less bursty.
The other thing with businesses is that a subscription plan defers some of your IT responsibility away from in house, that's actually good for small shops. Trying to navigate the various upgrade paths, support options, and trying to stay compliant with volume licencing arrangements costs money.
It also means, when you layoff staff, that you aren't stuck holding investments in software that you don't need anymore.
You're right, most consumers don't care, but that's where you want to find a value added service to tack on that you're charging for. Cloud storage and synchronization sort of stuff usually.
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the subscription thing is primarily driven by businesses, not consumers.
You're mostly right ... so far. But if you read the current stories about Microsoft's Office 365 pitch, they are very clearly pitching consumers. There have only been two subscription plans announced for Office 2013 so far: Home & Student and Home & Business. The Business one is designed for companies with 10 employees or less. The Home & Student one includes a license to install the software on five computers, and all can be used by different people as long as they belong to the same household.
Microsoft is expected to announce enterprise subscription plans for Office 2013, but they have said nothing about it so far. It's all pretty much been home users and very small businesses.
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Sure, but microsoft sees the writing on the wall here. Home computing is becoming small business computing. And microsoft wants to be your IT guy because that's a value added service they can charge for.
Cloud services are very useful for students, portability and you don't lose your data when someone steals your laptop (or you spill coffee on it etc.). They're useful for old people who can't figure out backups, and want to keep their (sometimes very) important documents safe from computer failures and th
Re:Hope this works. Ad supported is not what I wan (Score:4, Insightful)
> Only dirty open source hippies expect things to be free. The rest of us are perfectly willing to pay for things
Don't kid yourself. Windows users steal anything that isn't nailed down and then pass it around like party favors.
Microsoft's market share was built on this.
A Linux "freeloader" is far more likely to acknowledge that there is a license.
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This is some sort of alternative timeline thing, right ?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly what I'm doing now. I have a youtube channel where I do tutorials; I get all my video capture with CamStudio and the majority of my graphics together in gimp then every 4 months I subscribe to the adobe cloud service and in that month I finalize the graphics and then stitch everything together.
It's worked out pretty well for me so far this year and I'm saving a bunch of money. I save all the assets I reuse in their cloud so I don't have to worry about backing up/sorting everything on my computer.
A
Re:Adobe tried already (Score:5, Interesting)
As a soho business that deals with PII (personally identifiable information) I'm unable to advantage of any kind of cloud based office suite. The risk should any of that information be released accidently by Cloud Office is financial ruin due to fines, possible prison and being made an example by the Feds for violating while MS gets off with no risk. Sorry Charlie but it aint going to happen.
If the price of Windows and Office climbs to high, I'll have no choice but to move the entire business over to Open Source solutions just to stay in business. As far as document exchange go, I'm already using PDF as my base format. If the customer can't read it, then I wont do anymore business with them as everyone has a PDF reader available (Adobe Reader on Windows and native support on Apple). Solves the problem and I don't have to worry about them being able to edit/change anything w/o my being able to prove it. CYA man, CYA.
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If all you need is the phone, than 600 is clearly cheaper.
If, on the other hand, you'd also like to make calls with the phone, you'd have to add the separate monthly service subscription.
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Very few businesses take anything non-Microsoft seriously.
That is the issue, isn't it? In my environment, all the users have been migrated to linux distros and libre office. Then again, my environment is just that, mine. Any issues of compatibility are minor and usually not worth the hassle of worrying about. IE is a great example, requiring that I do special coding for it, so I've stopped using it. I tell my users that they are using a browser that isn't compliant to the standards and that they should either change to one that is or live with the issue.
This j