this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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Individual users can make use of free alternatives pretty easily, but I’m not sure they’re actually the target for the price increase here.
Schools, governments, businesses, and other institutions pay wild amounts to MS every year.
The same tool that can be used to permanently activate a Windows install can be used to permanently activate an Office install as well; including 365.
Oh, and the tool to do so is open-source.
Or you could just dump Microsoft entirely (unless you need Excel in particular). Either way, it's free.
Oh, wow, I didn't realize masgravel license 365 too.
Individuals can do that, and they should if they feel like keeping MS.
Organizations are, unfortunately, probably going to remain stagnant and keep paying millions to for things that have free alternatives.
It’s actually really infuriating. When I was in grad school I filed an information request with the college to see how much they paid for access to Office 365 each year. This was in 2021 and they were paying 4 million a year. Meanwhile their grad student employees were all living deeply below the poverty line.
Organizations aren’t just paying for access to applications, they’re also paying for cloud storage, email hosting, calendar tools, training, and all of the infrastructure to support that. Typically when you price out the cost of expanding the in-house IT department and the cost of acquiring and maintaining the infrastructure required to replicate the various cloud services, it ends up being break even at best. Qualified people who can set up and maintain infrastructure are quite expensive, especially when having to maintain high uptime/availability, 24/7 incident response, and compliance with various regulations, like those to protect students’ privacy.
The fact that micro-shit is getting paid by government and school districts for their slop is an abomination... But more realistically corruption within these procurement offices IMHO