This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
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?
It's not for you. It's for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
And then what? Also, that won't be legal in the EU.
I mean, you take billions of dollars to develop an AI to put into a product you already have, making it less competitive in the process to ... develop a slightly better AI maybe?
Where exactly is the return on investment here?
I don't disagree [with your comment (I absolutely disagree with what ms is doing)].
However, like with all technology in the past, where the civilian market received the obsolete military technologies (think, internet, cellphones, gps, and wifi), the consumer facing LLM/AI capabilities are likely nowhere near what the bleeding edge is in the military sector. The consumer facing Copilot is a product to make it "legal enough" to harvest your data, and the EULA people agreed to without reading is the nail on the coffin in that defense. The end product has nothing to do with copilot, office, or even us civilians. We're just the vehicle.
[Edit in brackets]
The clippy we all deserved
Make it too expensive and people will switch to Google docs.
Excel is the deal breaker on that. My last company was all Google products and auth, but I still had to buy Excel for the accounting and HR teams.
Um excel certainly has its places, but accounting? Don't they have actual dedicated software for accounting? HR? Like payroll? Again don't they have actual software for that?
And I was thinking personal use, whose costs were posted. $100 a year, fuck that.
See you think that - but excel finds a way. We have what are lovingly called the "spreadsheets of doom" which accounting uses to manage all forecasts, and the bits that involve money flows. Did you know you can hook excel into Salesforce and pull all the sales records? A person who thinks her monitor is her computer (she has a Dell laptop) somehow found a way...
I remember my dad had a problem and asked if he had to take the monitor or the tower to the shop.
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
They need money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
This decade for SURE! We promise!
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that's updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
It is. Remember when they just made a new version every 3 years and you didn't REALLY need to buy the latest one if you had the previous one?
Well that didn't make them enough money.
Excel has most businesses in a headlock. Can't see why anyone else pays for M$. I have Office, but it's a permanent license from my last job. When I upgrade, say bye bye.
Phew, this was a good reminder since I was meaning to cancel my subscription anyway. It was going to auto renew in 2 days. 😬
Makes me glad I continue to use the free Google and MS Office options and keep my cloud storage with a service that is dedicated to just storage.
Cuts down on all of the forced price increases due to the AI mess the MBAs need to justify the expense of.
Clippy is back!
GOZER
The choice is made. The Traveller has come.
VENKMAN
We didn't choose anything?!! I didn't think of an image, did you?
SPENGLER
No.
WINSTON
My mind's a total void!
[They all look at Ray]
RAY
I couldn't help it! It just popped in
there!
VENKMAN
What? What just popped in there?
SPENGLER
I have a radical idea... The door swings both ways. We could reverse the particle flow through the gate...
RAY
How?
SPENGLER
... we'll resize a table in Word
VENKMAN
Excuse me, Egon. You said resizing a table was bad...
RAY
[with realisation]
... resize the table...
VENKMAN
You're going to endanger us. You're going to endanger our client; the nice lady who paid us in advance before she turned into a dog
SPENGLER
Not necessarily. There's definitely a very slim chance we'll survive..
WINSTON
...
RAY
...
VENKMAN
I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! Let's do it!
Damn, we really didn't see that coming now did we? Can't wait until Amazon pulls that trigger on AWS.
If they actually bundled a game pass subscription with it and made a proper Microsoft complete subscription they could have softened the bad press they're getting on this (and giving customers something they've wanted for a while)
That and the fact that they've nearly doubled the price of the subscription to add a limited credit based feature just looks pretty slimy
bundled a game pass subscription
Most of the money MS gets from Office365 is from business users, not home users. I have a feeling that trying to sell game pass to corporate clients isn't going to be a huge hit...
Sure and it would be silly to mess with the professional tiers
But personal and family subscriptions are fairly squarely positioned towards non-business users as their main demographics, from what I can see.
Why on earth would they bundle gamepass into Office365? Office365 is pretty much used for business and educational institutions. Everybody else is a rounding error.
The overlap between Office365 owners and Xbox gamers is extremely small.
You'd just end up pissing everybody off by combining them
"They've added how much to the price by adding this gamer nonsense?! I don't need that crap, I want office software!"
"They've added how much to the price by including fucking PowerPoint and Outlook?! I don't need that crap, I want to play games!"
And not to defend MS, but a 43% increase isn't nearly doubling. A 100% increase would be doubling.
It's called Microsoft 365 now
Office 365 was when it was just a business productivity suite
They renamed it when they pivoted it to a general subscription and started adding things like clipchamp.
I mentioned in another comment though that I agree it would be silly to mess with the professional skus, but the home & family ones would make perfect sense to offer as an option at the very least (just as they're offering 365 without copilot for the time being).
I'm also not saying get rid of the independent subscriptions for Xbox, that would also be silly.
Just that a merged one would make a lot of sense for the people out there paying for both (which I reckon is a good number in the family subscription category at least)
More anti consumer garbage forced by a monopolistic juggernaut which the governments of the world refuse to do more than mildly scold. It's worse than chatgpt and pops up almost everywhere you click. Something about heads in asses
They should have made it opt-in instead of opt-out IMHO. You can still get the old subscription when you renew, but you have to jump through a couple of hoops. If you do nothing you just get "upgraded" for no reason.
Dolla dolla bill.