Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
office365itpros.com470 points by taubek 3 days ago
470 points by taubek 3 days ago
Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too.
The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on.
Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible.
Take a look at the full feature list to get an idea of what's included: https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...
And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...
To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.
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I think it's just that HN audiences is generally detached from the harsh reality of the "money people" who make these purchasing choices and are generally choosing the safe low friction option, that lets the business free to focus on product development and sales that are the core of business, rather than wasting resources on building and managing IT infra from FOSS scratch for the sake of avoiding $BIG_TECH.
If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product.
Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.
I also didn't understand where sentiment of the same industry that promote SaaS for their niche tool comes from
like this is YC sponsored site, there is a tons of SaaS for niche toolkit that people sold,shares etc
and now all of sudden they hate it when other people doing the same thing they do
I'm not buying or selling a SaaS. I don't like them. HN has more than one user and they don't all agree.
Yeah but its your opinion, we talking about facts
not believe it???? just click past button and its shows top 50 of HN upvoted thread for yesterday and its shows multiple of SaaS product or SaaS clothed OpenSource in some form or another
> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive.
I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.
And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
In all fairness I think Notion and Google have made some level of headway for FWIW.
Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
> plenty of developer talent
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
There aren’t the same thing.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
>Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
It would be a huge undertaking. You have to use tens of different software packages who weren't designed to work with each other, unlike MS offering. Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?
> Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?
Maybe, if you can rally public resources behind you. Probably not given the value you can command in the private sector.
That’s the point. These people are expensive. Because they’re rare. There is a talent deficit at the top of tech, and if I had to describe it broadly, it’s in folks who can (a) write a letter to an elected representative that doesn’t get thrown in the nutter pile and (b) raise money.
If doing it from scratch, if jumping off from an already established product - could work, along with name recognition.
If there was one that i would put that could go head to head and possibly pull it off would be Corel[1], their suite is pretty comprehensive along with their collaborative suite.
Althogh from their businesss model seems they are content to maintain a narrow market and possible still remember getting burned by MS in the early days.
> If there was one that i would put that could go head to head and possibly pull it off would be Corel[1], their suite is pretty comprehensive
Or SoftMaker ([1], [2]) with their product SoftMaker Office ([3], [4]).
[1] https://www.softmaker.com/en/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office
500 million users. Just because you haven't heard it doesn't mean an alternative doesn't exist.
Issue is, the WPS office suite is more bloated with ads than even Microsoft's offerings are, and, overall, is quite a doozy to navigate.
If you want a true and good alternative, I'd recommend ONLYOFFICE[1].
OpenOffice is no longer actively developed. It was replaced by LibreOffice quite awhile ago.
The comment links to OnlyOffice, which is a different app suite from OpenOffice.
It's not going to be a valid alternative in the west - certainly not something any government would even consider.
"alternative" is doing a lot of lifting here.
While more efficient in some areas, it's missing a lot of quality of life tools plus legal/compliance/security tooling.
While there does not seem to be a maintained snap or flagpole package available, the company behind WPS Office releases DEBs and RPMs it seems: https://www.tech2geek.net/how-to-install-wps-office-on-linux...
There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope.
Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
You are looking from the perspective of a user of the software - sure, these have enough feature parity to "compete".
But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives.
How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking work? How does audit work? And that's just the surface.
Needs for large enterprises, where you cannot just have John from HR make a new account for the new hire, are often not met by the opensource world.
Large enterprises were doing this stuff with Unix and mainframes long before Microsoft figured out what preemptive multitasking was.
And decided that it was cheaper and easier to just outsource it to Microsoft. Because doing it in today's environment - different work computers, backend servers, mobile devices, etc - is much more complicated than just managing permissions on a mainframe.
Distributed databases are a solved problem (besides maybe performance). Offloading account management to arbitrary databases too. Why everyone is using Microsoft is, because then they have someone to blame, instead of needing to point at themselves.