This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Wait, they think people want Copilot? Like enough to pay money for it?
They are banking on customers being too invested in office to switch.
I think that might be their plan for all their products at this point. Just existing though inertia.
Copilot Is literally ChatGPT With a diff logo and name.
I use both for work, copilot is worse.
It's "ENTERPRISE"
"The cost of running the hallucination machine is too expensive so instead of charging people who want to use it, we have instead decided to charge everyone who uses any of our services even if they don't want to use the hallucination machine"
For anyone who doesn't already know the good FOSS alternatives:
There are home users of Microsoft 365?
I'm not shaming but I kinda am. Like WTF is wrong with you? You pay for free shit.
Office employees don't get to choose.
Actually I have admin access to my work laptop, so while my employer pays for what ever the fuck they pay for I frequently use FOSS instead.
I do it to make a point.
They bundle it in laptop purchases. M$ dominate because of the b2b stitch up.
Wow Lotta folks gonna discover that LibreOffice is much better than MS Office. Not to mention, free.
COPILOT IS NOW A PAID FEATURE?????? hell nah, microsoft be banking on their users.
Preaching to the choir here but LibreOffice has been excellent since my MSOffice license expired. Unless you're working in an enterprise setting with MS-specific macros or online collaboration, there's no reason to be paying for basic document editing software in 2025.
There are also self-hosted and open-sourced collaborative editing suites available that I haven't tried yet, but there are plenty of options
So I've never used Microsoft office because I could never afford it. I went from notepad to wordpad to OpenOffice to libreoffice. I've never had a single issue even as a professional not using word. I actually really enjoy writing as a hobby and I just don't get this copiolet thing. Why would I want something to do the thing I like doing? Screw that.
For professional settings, I understand the theoretical appeal of ai writing. A lot of people don't like writing emails, but they have to for work. Many of those same people fret about tone or presentation, because silly office politics reasons (real or one-sidedly imagined in their heads.)
The solution, really is workplaces just need to cut down on the useless drivel emails and people need to be ok with short, no frills emails.
There are tons more applications in the workplace. For example, one of the people in my team is dyslexic and sometimes needs to write reports that are a few pages long. For him, having the super-autocorrect tidy up his grammar makes a big difference.
Sometimes I have a list of say 200 software changes that would be a pain to summarise, but where it's intuitively easy for me to know if a summary is right. For something like a changelog I can roll the dice with the hallucination machine until I get a correct summary, then tidy it up. That takes less than a tenth of the time than writing it myself.
Sometimes writing is necessary and there's no way to cut down the drivel unfortunately. Talking about professional settings of course - having the Large Autocorrect writing a blog post or a poem for you is a total misuse of the tool in my opinion.
Fun story, it's called office 365 as when you see the price you'll turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Ok that doesn't really work but God I love that stupid joke.
Anyway I haven't used office personally for ages and never seem to run into real compatibility issues with the meager personal/business overlap in my situation.
It made me chuckle a little imaging that you do a full 365 degree spin Infront of Microsoft and then walk away (in an awkward way), instead of 180 degrees to walk the opposite direction haha
Technically speaking with 365* of rotation if you are far enough away you will be able to walk past microsoft, so this is possible.
365 spin, then realizing your mistake and awkwardly walking backwards out of the room
At the right distance it's just enough pivot to give them a spiteful shoulder check on the way out.
worlds most over glorified over priced office website that runs like a slug
I'm so glad I work in an industry where I can get away with using Libre Office.
I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
The clippy we all deserved
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn't add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it's almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
I use ms office 2007 it runs perfectly in wine and still has the cool version of wordart
For existing customers, the price hike won't be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the "Classic" or "Basic" Microsoft 365 plans.
Thankfully we can roll back to the "Classic Family Plan" without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn't see this article I'd be up for a big price hike when it renewed.
But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back.
Should be illegal.
Everyone experiencing this should be thinking "man, I gotta ditch Microsoft before they try to fuck me again"
Subscriptions like these have always been a scam.
Oh shit maybe we'll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.
"You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we're done half baking it into all our apps and now we're almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all."
The logic of the utterly deranged...
I’ve had nothing but issues administrating Office 365. A price hike like this is incentivizing me to push other products like Google workspace.
Nice parts are definitely user email tools and some of the audit tools, but I keep finding myself in scenarios where I get error 500s on the server side when I pop open dev tools and it’s like I don’t want to tell my users that they’re SOL but they sort of are if I can’t resolve some error on Microsoft’s o365 servers. Microsoft likes to ask what I did to fix the case if I fix it before they do and I just laugh and not rely to those. They can pay me extra for that or hire me if they want that info.
I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it's 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.
