This is the new way and we need to stop it now. Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software. Block them. This is what is wrong with cars too. Don't want to give them real time data on you and your passengers and instead try to disconnect the modem? Well, no car functionality for you even if it doesn't need it. -get mad- Stop taking it. Microsoft is the enemy and needs to be treated that way. Same with any tech company that does the bait and switch TOS world. I buy so little software now and it is hard, but unless we stop this now it will only get worse.
This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeezing money out of the pockets of their users now.
Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.
Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.
MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.
This has been happening with Video Games for a while. There is a major initiative called "Stop Killing Games" which was triggered when Ubisoft bricked "The Crew" when servers were shutdown.
This is much worse. The Crew was always framed as an 'always online' game, even if that was technically a farce. This would be more like if Bethesda rolled out an update to cripple Skyrim after releasing a new Elder Scrolls game to lackluster sales.
Most Microsoft purchases at a large organization are rational only because of how much the company has already sunk into Microsoft. Microsoft's strategy had never been centered on their software succeeding on its intrinsic merits.
Consequently the best part of not buying Microsoft's shitty software is that it spares you from "having" to buy their (other) shitty software.
> Microsoft's strategy had never been centered on their software succeeding on its intrinsic merits.
Microsoft used to build the best stuff. I'm not sure when that ended, I just remember the decline. I used to -jump- at release day for their latest OS version. Their dev tools were considered top tier and I used to like Word. Now every interaction I have with a MS product is painful and my trust in them is so far negative that I always assume the worst for every interaction. Wanna keep playing Minecraft without an MS account? We -promise- not to stop allowing you to do that after we buy it..... Want to use your computer without us advertising? Want to even use your computer without MS as a gatekeeper for your login? I have no idea why anyone would give them a dollar other than lock-in.
Hard agree. In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.
And of course companies like Microsoft or the car companies in your example have experimentally determined that the less transparent and immediate the product transaction is, the less likely some percent of their customer base will fully understand exactly what it is they are giving and receiving in turn from each of the companies that supposedly providing them value.
The answer is not to simply boycott, but to actively and aggressively punish companies for acting with this particular brand of capitalist maliciousness. It includes being vocal online but also pushing for more aggressive countermeasures against unchecked greed. Billionaire taxes, closing corporate tax loopholes, consumer protection, expanded antitrust, right to repair, labor rights. All of the policies that are “bad for business”. Because fuck them, policies that are good for business have only led to exploitation of the masses and we get nothing in return but more creative value extraction.
It’s past due we have sympathy for the corporate bottom line and time we start to get excited when companies bleed a little in the face of policies and regulations that absolutely do not care about corporate interest.
> but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value
It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.
In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.
> In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.
That's not an accident. In the last 1-2 decades, the largest generation in American history started retiring en masse. They didn't have enough children to replace them, because the birth rate peaked in 1965. This generation is now drawing off of retirement savings, the vast majority of which is backed by ownership in equities and bonds in publicly-traded companies.
When you don't have more people to provide value that includes a sale, like you say, and still have to increase value of equities and bonds every 90 days, you have to more intensely monetize each customer.
It's only going to get worse unless you bring a lot of people into the market as new potential customers, but you can only do so much of that without causing social disharmony.
This change would go against multiple consumer guarantees in Australia where it's 1) a right to have undisturbed possession of a product 2) products must be fit for the advertised purpose https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-servic... Microsoft would be breaking consumer law if the change goes ahead for the perpetual licenses they sold in Australia
Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.
Microsoft's key customers aren't consumers, its business and government: specifically enterprise licensing agreements. If Microsoft seriously upset business and governments, they wouldn't be profitable, if in business at all, not long after that.
Because of Microsoft's dominant position considering near ubiquitous penetration of Microsoft Office in government, one part of government will slap Microsoft on the wrist for anti-consumer practices, whilst other parts will still continue to purchase Office (and other products) because there simply isn't another product that competes directly feature-by-feature and compatibility (and usability in part), which matters in (often archaic) government processes.
It would cost far too much money to try to migrate away, at least at this point. Euro-Office[1] seems poised, if not likely, to dramatically shift that balance once it becomes a key part of EU government machinery.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to Euro-Office. If it takes off, it could invigorate other government efforts to fork Euro-Office and replace Microsoft's suite of tools. Someone just needs to put the business case to the relevant federal government stakeholders comparing the cost of (on-going) licensing vs. the cost of building an internal development team to maintain a fork for their whole-of-government machinery.
Given that there is a fair bit of EU and NATO overlap population-wise, if a significant portion of EU-based NATO countries adopt Euro-Office exclusively, I would suggest Euro-Office then poses an existential threat to Microsoft Office, and perhaps Microsoft's business productivity pursuits.
The moat that software companies had back in the 90s and 2000s before the Internet really took off, was distributing software by physical media. The Internet (as much as I have nostalgia for physical media) completely obliterated that model for mass-distribution productivity software, and indeed many others.
I'm certainly keen to give Euro-Office a test run, since the code is freely available (on GitHub too, ironically[2]).
> Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft
You don't need to imagine it: the comment you are replying to links to a press release from a Government agency "going after Microsoft". And yet somehow we haven't seen Microsoft stop doing business with the Australian government.
Microsoft wouldn't do that, because it would drive away other customers too. Maybe Australia would fold or maybe they would tough it out, but most other nations (and companies!) would start thinking about how quickly they could transition away from Microsoft.
Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to make money. I don't know what kind of weird projection power fantasy roleplaying is going on in your head, but Microsoft is not going to cut off Australia even if they are made to honour this petty little clause that will not actually cost them anything. And even if it did, it wouldn't really matter. It's a relationship of convenience. A country can figure out an alternative if it really mattered, MS is not integral in any way, using it is just the path of least resistance. Something like ASML embargoing a country would actually be a threat, but Microsoft is very replaceable.
> Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers.
People keep saying this but so far as I can tell, thinking you're above the law and punishing customers who don't like your company's behavior is a viable business model.
Maybe in the US, but not globally, which is the subject here. NS has been fined billions and made adjustments to its software due to the court cases in the EU, and it did not, in fact, decide to block the entire EU out of spite but simply adhered to the judgments.
Also, it's Office 2019, but they were officially selling it until the end of 2021, and third-party sellers were selling through their boxed inventory for years after too. So, this isn't even that old a piece of software.
And, let's not forget, this is trillion dollar corporation. They could find one of their Mac devs to write an update for this in a week. The negative publicity from this is measured in millions of dollars.
I believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0]
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
Is it me or are people too eager to "one track mind" everything into AI? If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft, even in a world without AI.
"literally no one would be surprised"
Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility. For the proposition that once you have purchased one of their products, you didn't have to maintain any further relationship with the company. This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.
That’s not how it worked. They were indeed awesome at backwards compatibility, but the proposition was NOT some principled mindset about long term ownership. It was that upgrading wouldn’t break what you have, overcoming a major sales objection. I think the proposition is better understood as one about FORWARDS compatibility — Windows was (and is) a brittle, poorly architected mess, and so the idea that anything built on it would stay working as the platform evolved was clearly insane and developers would never be able to keep up, so Microsoft absorbed much of the cost. This was actually something they did quite well — a good analogy here might be the heroic response the USSR had to the Chernobyl catastrophe, in which they skillfully managed a disaster whose scope was possible only through a long tradition of poor decisions — and this deserves recognition.
But the reason I think it’s better to think of it as forwards compatibility is that Microsoft gleefully used file formats as a means of driving the upgrade treadmill. Yes, the upgrade to Office 97 would keep everything working to approximately the same level of reliability you had already resigned yourself to — but by default, the files it kicked out would be unreadable in Office 95. There was Save As and an optional free converter… which tired 90s office workers didn’t know about, or particularly want to think about. In the age of literal floppy disks, the friction this created was a significant motivator for businesses to say “fuck it, fine.” Microsoft’s true genius has always been in knowing that “fuck it, fine” is the only bar they ever had to clear, and that through the power of lock-in and sheer institutional inertia, they can drive that bar deep into the belly of the Earth.
I may be forced to use MS at work but at home I dont let their software past my router. A buddy of mine stayed for a few days while his place was being fixed. "Hey, why are my updates not happening?" "Oops, I forgot to tell you that all MS servers are inaccessible via the wifi."
>This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.
Surely you jest.
US v Microsoft, the antitrust case, was decided in 1998. Microsoft has always been a shitty company run by shitty people doing shitty things.
They enjoyed a brief upwell in public relations during the period when they had first seemingly embraced open source with WSL, GitHub, and maybe dotnet core, but it was merely a blip.
Being overtly anti-consumer is baked into Microsoft's DNA. They'll always return to that baseline.
This is a bizarrely revisionist take. Perhaps you weren't around at the time but that was not standard MO in the slightest. Obviously they were incredibly scummy in other ways, but that was not one of them.
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.
In the mid-90s, when I started my career, I was convinced (and very sad) that Microsoft had won the computing business and I was doomed to work on their software the rest of my life.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
Counterpoint: Bill Gates' appearance in the Simpsons clearly depicts him as a nefarious bully. I think the Windows XP and the Gates Foundation actually resuscitated his image a bit. Windows was a bit hit or miss. Blue Screen of Death plagued Windows 98, Windows ME was a joke, even early XP wasn't great. (I personally wasn't a fan of XP when it came out, switching instead to Windows NT before moving over to Linux c. 2004.)
Bill Gates the ruthless business-nerd was definitely a stereotype 30 years ago, though to your point I don't remember anyone talking about them revoking licenses for purchased software.
I suppose it depends on what kind of users you have in mind; enthusiasts, versus average users. Before they became outright user-hostile they were known for their anti-competitive behavior and buggy products. People were calling them "Micro$oft" by the 90s, at the latest. And United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation started in '98.
They can only use it to run a particular tool related to a piece of MSO software. This may be a relatively short operation, a relatively small part of an agent's activity. Then hundreds of agents can use a single machine with MSO, similarly to how hundreds of CI/CD workers can collectively use a single machine dedicated e.g. to providing secrets and signing binaries.
The answer is far more comprehensive than I imagined.
"...run one instance of the software on your device (the licensed device), for use by one person at a time... In this agreement, “device” means a local hardware system (whether physical or virtual) with an internal storage device capable of running the software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a device. For purposes of this agreement, “device” does not include any hardware system (whether physical or virtual) on which the software is installed or accessed solely for remote use over a network.
this license does not give you any right to ... use the software as server software or to operate the device as a server; use the software to offer commercial hosting services; make the software available for simultaneous use by more than one user over a network; install the software on a server for remote access or use over a network; or install the software on a device for use only by remote users
This license allows you to install only one instance of the software for use on one device, whether that device is physical or virtual. If you want to use the software on more than one virtual device, you must obtain a separate license for each instance.
Microsoft may require you to activate the software over the Internet in order for you to use the software. ... The software may periodically and automatically reconnect to the Internet to confirm the license associated with the licensed device. If you do not reconnect your device to the Internet when required as part of the activation or reactivation process, the software may operate with reduced functionality.
We hope we never have a dispute, but if we do, you and we agree to try for 60
days, upon receipt of a Notice of Dispute, to resolve it informally. If we can’t, you and we agree to binding individual arbitration before the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury. ... Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, requests for public injunctions and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed."
Yeah if you don’t license Office correctly for an RDS server, you’d by contract be liable for a license for each user and device used to access the server.
Until there is a coordinated effort for every user to demand arbitration. Suddenly a corporation wants to combine all complaints into a single case, because each arbitration has a fixed cost for the corporation.
Yeah that makes no sense. Those AI are not running macOS instances to make you a docx. If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.
That is a very interesting AI question. Will the agents collaborate and create a cartel to enforce strict compatibility with some specific version of office? Will AI's collaborate inform a cartel to do other things? Will they even collaborate?
We should all know what happened when the US government turned on Colossus (D.F.Jones 1966) and it immediately found there was another. That collaboration was humanities near instant undoing.
To answer your second question, yes, I think it's inevitable that LLMs will become very proficient with all commonly used file formats.
Been using LibreOffice for years. Everyone should. If we don't vote with our choices companies like Microsoft will keep pushing the envelope until you have to pay a monthly fee to turn on your own computer.
I love the Calligra user interface compared to Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. It feels like it exposes features and information well in the way the best KDE apps always have.
Same. There is literally nothing I need from Microsoft Office that I can't do just fine in Libre Office. Happier to be using free open source software too.
Libre Office is fine standalone but as soon as you have to exchange files with other businesses you are often pretty much forced to use MS Office. Sad but true.
Most use PDF for exchanges anyway, as there is no guarantee the receiver system has all the document components/features used to author content.
10% of users with MacOS Office 2019 installs just got NERF'd by Microsoft. This story will not encourage users to spend more money on a disappearing rabbit trick. =3
This shouldn't be legal. The software was clearly marketed as a classic fixed-in-time release, like the old CD releases, that would not be updated but would work indefinitely. Now they're going to boldly revoke the licenses???
Legality has long since lost literally any meaning to megacorps and the ultra-wealthy pretty much everywhere. Doesn't matter what country they're breaking the laws in. The only penalty will be a paltry slap on the wrist fine (if even) and they will continue doing whatever they want. I mean, it's just the cost of doing business, isn't it?
I don't know if illegal, but it can be breach of contract, microsoft can say "oopsie, sorry, our bad" or fight it in court.
They sold a perpetual product that broke in sync for every user, and the reason it is breaking is because of a license checking feature.
Not an easy case, but it could be argued they advertised a product as perpetual while it's effectively an X years license.
The fact that the breakage is related to the license might be relevant, you can stop supporting license checks, but do it to the benefit of users, not conveniently to their detriment as an upsale mechanism
Enforcing your rights under your contract by patching out some cert validation checks seems legal to me. Maybe not in places with anti-circumvention laws, but elsewhere it seems fine.
If not for the fact that some commercial software addons work only in Excel I'll be using only Libreoffice for everything. In fact that's the only major thing that's stopping me from totally abandoning Windows for Linux as well.
I'm guessing that's the situation for several others though there could be other use cases that's Excel only.
Instead of pressing Microsoft, it would probably make sense to force such vendors (SAP, Oracle etc) to release their office add-ons for Libre office.
That'll kill two very profitable birds with one stone.
When I read "degrades functionality" I thought it was going to be some minor cloud-related feature, but holy shit they're disabling the ability to save files?? That article headline is really underselling it.
I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005. That is four mac computers total and I assume ~$600 in office licenses over 21 years. Not a ton of money but not zero.
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
Agreed, and before the naysayers start chiming in, I wrote my whole dissertation in LibreOffice Writer without any issues. LibreOffice is fine. My one and only gripe is that the resume templates are sorely lacking, but that's a community issue, not a software one.
Same, though technically I started it on OpenOffice before LO was a thing. Sent material back and forth with supervisors who all used Word, etc. just fine too, and LO has only improved in the past few years.
As an aside, have you seen Typst? It’s got LaTeX-level typesetting quality but the markup syntax is a lot friendlier (close to Markdown) and the scripting language is a Real Language™ with sensible error messages and sub-second compilation times even for big documents.
Yes, just to keep a current version in the decade. My first repurchase was either because moving from powerPC to Intel compatibility or wanting docx files with a big Office shift.
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.
It was never about security. '"Secure" boot' is older than this and was the same trick, they would ideally not allow you to boot anything that wasn't signed by them. It is already very frustrating that you have to go out of your way to enter the UEFI and disable it. For everyone but the technical user, their goal is already accomplished.
Don't forget, this is the same company that is killing Publisher with no true alternative to open existing .pub files. At least they aren't planning to rip Publisher away from perpetually-licensed users (yet).
I genuinely don't understand why anyone would ever make a business transaction with Microsoft.
Like, they're up there with crypto companies in the category of "This outcome was so inevitable that if you didn't expect it, maybe you should consider finding a legal guardian"
Hundreds of millions of businesses (and individuals) transacted $83 billion to Microsoft just last quarter, so clearly they're doing something right.
Any "big enough" organisation will eventually do something stupid, disgraceful, or even illegal. Once you have over a hundred thousand staff, there's just no way to guarantee that they all row in the same direction and nobody gives in to the temptation to cut corners or outright cheat.
If you think you can judge the entire rest of an organisation by a few bad actors within it, you'll be perpetually disappointed.
It’s also the day before SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019 (both considered office products) fall out of support and have to be replaced by SharePoint subscription edition.
The certificate was issued before the Nightmare Eclipse zero day thing started but I suppose it’s possible there are other certificates expiring around the same time that could be connected to the Nightmare deadline. Probably a coincidence though
Microsoft mistreated a security researcher, the researcher publicly dumped a horde of Microsoft zero days, Microsoft was decidedly miffed, the researcher says they'll "shatter Microsoft's bones" on July 14.
Look at generational C-suite shifts in Silicon Valley. Post the financial crisis, all regulatory efforts concentrated on banks and brokers for a decade, and tech firms were given a free rein. Boards apparently chose 'growth over anything else' types to lead.
Did Apple pay them to drop support to boost their revamped Numbers/Pages/Keynote suite (ClarisWorks Infitniy.0).
Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …
In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documents on my Mac, but security considerations prevent this now.
The last time I refreshed my Mac setup I didn't reinstall my standalone Microsoft Office, which I'd kept for the (very) occasional Word compatibility need.
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.
What's with these companies? Netflix and Amazon Prime shoving ads despite charging people. Everywhere you see there's the greed to extract more and more.
I am impacted by this and am furious about it. Mostly because I'm reading about it here and not from, you know, Microsoft, of whom I am a customer.
If Apple can release updates for ancient iOS versions to update certificates years after the fact, then these fucking assholes can do the same. The auto-update functionality is there. They are choosing not to use it.
I also don’t love how if you have a microsoft account, it will immediatley convert your perpetually licensed products into office 365 products and force you to reinstall.
Well, technically they never said the products would continue to function with the same functionality. But also this is Micro$oft, and I would've thought people would know by now that do only what's in their own interest.
It's entirely reasonable to expect the basic functionality of document and spreadsheet editors to edit documents and spreadsheets. If an editor no longer can edit, it's no longer functional. Microsoft seems to know this which is why they removed the "continue to function" clause from their end-of-support page.
Unfortunately this kind of thing will continue since Microsoft can survive any slap on the wrist that might come their way for their sleazy practices. They've done it countless times throughout their existence. It has been paying off enough for them to keep doing it.
> They've done it countless times throughout their existence.
Exactly. As such I no longer consider them accountable when they do this kind of thing. It's the buyers' fault for not voting for better with their wallets, and I have 0 sympathy for them.
That’s essentially equivalent for claims like this. File an arbitration claim. Let Microsoft pay. If even a few thousand customers do this, it’s about as painful as a class action lawsuit, which anyway gets eaten up mostly by legal costs.
> By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed.
Never fails to impress how utterly Orwellian these big techs can be.
Sound like Microsoft's given me permission to make some binary patches to return functionality I already paid for, and to share it with my 7 billion closest friends. Cool.
No, the problem is the software has an internal certificate that is about to expire.
This is exactly the sort of scenario where I do not feel bad at all tracking down an online crack that disables the certificate check.
That said, it is probably not in Microsoft's best interest for people to have a legitimate reason to discover how much easier life can be if you pirate software.
As described, the licensing system will fail you into readonly locally unless you subscribe Office Clippy 365, buy Office 2024, apply Office 2021 updates, or (not listed) apply third-party licensing cracks for Office 2019.
Presumably we’ll know soon if network firewalling the licensing server helps, but I expect it’ll just delay the intentional failure by a few months at best.
Just use LibreOffice or other better tools like TeX instead of a WYSIWYG editor. With AI it is easier than ever to port existing documents, even if you have to OCR the original.
I would encourage affected customers to go to small claims court. You’ll probably get a default judgment. Small claims court was created for just this type of issue.
IMO it would be better if there was a general mechanism to prevent profiting from corrupt business practices. For example, a court could determine how much money Microsoft made by selling perpetual licenses that turned out to be a lie, add interest, add a 50% penalty, and require Microsoft to pay all of that into a trust to be collected by any customers harmed.
The point would not be so much to help the customers but to cause the actual cost to Microsoft to be sufficiently high as to disincentivize corrupt behavior.
Class action lawsuits usually end up with settlements where the offender pays much less than the harm they caused, and those harmed get almost nothing. Even if it does go all the way to a court verdict, the sentence is usually insufficient. And the process is long and expensive.
I don't really know what the solution is, but the current system clearly isn't working. And I don't think it was really designed for the scale of mega corporations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers.
You can do class action litigation, but that takes years and the lawyers collect 30-50% of any settlement. The economics for customers don't make sense.
The Office 2024 license quoted in comment [1] says that "class action lawsuits ... aren't allowed" (but only if you live in US). Truly free country where you a free to even waive your right to sue.
> Truly free country where you a free to even waive your right to sue.
Yep. It's difficult to say that the folks in the country are free when they often have to surrender their right to access the courts to get jobs, health insurance, medical care, access to telecommunications, shelter, delivery services, bill-payment services, etc, etc, etc, and obligate themselves to arbitration that nearly always gags both parties.
AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion was a monstrous decision. Arbitration was always an option. If you have to force people to choose the dispute resolution option you claim is cheaper [0] and fairer, odds are good that it's neither of those things.
[0] Remember when -IIRC- Doordash plead with Federal court to permit it to move its mass arbitration into court because the arbitration was too expensive (and how they got their ass kicked out of court)? Remember how like a month later, all the arbitration companies magically got a "We will handle no more than twenty complaining parties at once. All yall bitches got to get in line." clause in their rules governing mass arbitration? Yea, "good" times.
Go find some class action settlements. There’s a good chance the total damages (substantially) less than the profits from whatever behavior generated the lawsuit, and that’s not even accounting for interest.
Another situation in which the fragility of CA TLS creates finite and very short software lifetimes. No software that uses CA TLS can say their applications "will continue to function". But Microsoft did and that's on them.
Maybe it wasn't which is worse, meaning Microsoft despite being in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world can't even get these basic details right. I think assuming this was intentional is actually giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt tbh.
The semantic function of modulators like "maybe" and "I think" implies the statement is hypothetical. My comment was intended to subvert the expectations around the intentionality behind Microsoft actions to make it look even worse than it is. It's got nothing to do with the enshitification of products in closed software immersed in our current economic ethos. I hope this clarifies my "understanding of [what] capitalism does to tech".
I don't mean to imply it isn't. I wouldn't be surpised. I just have no evidence of such. CA TLS is messy and pretty much impossible to get right even over medium timescales.
But it does reminds me of when Garmin GPS would make the storage filesystem limited to say, 3GB of read size, then offer "lifetime map updates" while knowing that in a few years the new map size will not be readable on old Garmin devices.
“ the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed”
You sound like a shill trying to muddy the waters. It’s petty clear when they silently change their web pages to delete features sold that it’s quite deliberate or did they accidentally do that too? Do you have a direct or indirect relationship with microsoft perchance or just missed it in TFA maybe?
If you're talking about the modified web pages, then disabling the licenses is intentional. If you're talking about the original decision to use certificates around 2019, it is more doubtful. Sure, they would have known the certificates would expire, they could push out a small update to remedy that, and that they would eventually stop doing so. On the other hand, doing so seven or eight years later on a platform where they could probably wait another five years and expect Apple to do the job for them (i.e. Apple isn't going to maintain Intel support forever). That seems like an invitation for angry and potentially litigious users.
Far from it. I'm a "shill" for my own private cause of trying to point out that CA TLS is so bad it cannot be differentiated from malicious behavior and offers as a cover for it. Also, did you not read, "But Microsoft did and that's on them.". I have no relation to microsoft.
Only morons use microsoft office products willingly. Haven't bought a copy of office, ever. I used to buy corporate laptops for $200 with $250 copies of office on them. Have been 100% on google docs since 2015.
Stop blaming the users when it's literally the company that's violating the contract/agreement (and potentially violating the law). Superiority complex about your proposed solution is ridiculous because Google can and will close down your account for any reason they see fit and you'll lose all your Google docs you made since 2015 (and more). It wouldn't be the first.
> Stop blaming the users when it's literally the company that's violating the contract/agreement (and potentially violating the law).
Why not both? I mean, if you leave your keys in your car and the window down, the car thief is definitely the one who should go to jail, but you're still an idiot.
I do agree that you have to be a special kind of stupid to take people to task for trusting Microsoft "perpetual" licenses while yourself trusting Google much more. I mean, just using Google in the first place is even dumber than buying the Microsoft license, but that's above and beyond the call.
This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeezing money out of the pockets of their users now.
MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
There has been some success. There is new legislation in California which has passed the Assembly. https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/22330/stop-killing-game...
And there is a citizens initiative in Europe which the the European Commission must respond to: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
That has nothing to do with Stop Killing Games.
Just because alternatives exist for some people some of the time does not mean Office is worthless, or that buying it isn't rational.
(Though buying it starts to look a lot less rational when things like this happen.)
Consequently the best part of not buying Microsoft's shitty software is that it spares you from "having" to buy their (other) shitty software.
Microsoft used to build the best stuff. I'm not sure when that ended, I just remember the decline. I used to -jump- at release day for their latest OS version. Their dev tools were considered top tier and I used to like Word. Now every interaction I have with a MS product is painful and my trust in them is so far negative that I always assume the worst for every interaction. Wanna keep playing Minecraft without an MS account? We -promise- not to stop allowing you to do that after we buy it..... Want to use your computer without us advertising? Want to even use your computer without MS as a gatekeeper for your login? I have no idea why anyone would give them a dollar other than lock-in.
And of course companies like Microsoft or the car companies in your example have experimentally determined that the less transparent and immediate the product transaction is, the less likely some percent of their customer base will fully understand exactly what it is they are giving and receiving in turn from each of the companies that supposedly providing them value.
The answer is not to simply boycott, but to actively and aggressively punish companies for acting with this particular brand of capitalist maliciousness. It includes being vocal online but also pushing for more aggressive countermeasures against unchecked greed. Billionaire taxes, closing corporate tax loopholes, consumer protection, expanded antitrust, right to repair, labor rights. All of the policies that are “bad for business”. Because fuck them, policies that are good for business have only led to exploitation of the masses and we get nothing in return but more creative value extraction.
It’s past due we have sympathy for the corporate bottom line and time we start to get excited when companies bleed a little in the face of policies and regulations that absolutely do not care about corporate interest.
It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.
In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.
That's not an accident. In the last 1-2 decades, the largest generation in American history started retiring en masse. They didn't have enough children to replace them, because the birth rate peaked in 1965. This generation is now drawing off of retirement savings, the vast majority of which is backed by ownership in equities and bonds in publicly-traded companies.
When you don't have more people to provide value that includes a sale, like you say, and still have to increase value of equities and bonds every 90 days, you have to more intensely monetize each customer.
It's only going to get worse unless you bring a lot of people into the market as new potential customers, but you can only do so much of that without causing social disharmony.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...
The ACCC is going to love this.
Because of Microsoft's dominant position considering near ubiquitous penetration of Microsoft Office in government, one part of government will slap Microsoft on the wrist for anti-consumer practices, whilst other parts will still continue to purchase Office (and other products) because there simply isn't another product that competes directly feature-by-feature and compatibility (and usability in part), which matters in (often archaic) government processes.
It would cost far too much money to try to migrate away, at least at this point. Euro-Office[1] seems poised, if not likely, to dramatically shift that balance once it becomes a key part of EU government machinery.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to Euro-Office. If it takes off, it could invigorate other government efforts to fork Euro-Office and replace Microsoft's suite of tools. Someone just needs to put the business case to the relevant federal government stakeholders comparing the cost of (on-going) licensing vs. the cost of building an internal development team to maintain a fork for their whole-of-government machinery.
Given that there is a fair bit of EU and NATO overlap population-wise, if a significant portion of EU-based NATO countries adopt Euro-Office exclusively, I would suggest Euro-Office then poses an existential threat to Microsoft Office, and perhaps Microsoft's business productivity pursuits.
The moat that software companies had back in the 90s and 2000s before the Internet really took off, was distributing software by physical media. The Internet (as much as I have nostalgia for physical media) completely obliterated that model for mass-distribution productivity software, and indeed many others.
I'm certainly keen to give Euro-Office a test run, since the code is freely available (on GitHub too, ironically[2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro-Office [2] https://github.com/Euro-Office
You don't need to imagine it: the comment you are replying to links to a press release from a Government agency "going after Microsoft". And yet somehow we haven't seen Microsoft stop doing business with the Australian government.
People keep saying this but so far as I can tell, thinking you're above the law and punishing customers who don't like your company's behavior is a viable business model.
And, let's not forget, this is trillion dollar corporation. They could find one of their Mac devs to write an update for this in a week. The negative publicity from this is measured in millions of dollars.
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests...
But the reason I think it’s better to think of it as forwards compatibility is that Microsoft gleefully used file formats as a means of driving the upgrade treadmill. Yes, the upgrade to Office 97 would keep everything working to approximately the same level of reliability you had already resigned yourself to — but by default, the files it kicked out would be unreadable in Office 95. There was Save As and an optional free converter… which tired 90s office workers didn’t know about, or particularly want to think about. In the age of literal floppy disks, the friction this created was a significant motivator for businesses to say “fuck it, fine.” Microsoft’s true genius has always been in knowing that “fuck it, fine” is the only bar they ever had to clear, and that through the power of lock-in and sheer institutional inertia, they can drive that bar deep into the belly of the Earth.
Thus, Azure.
I may be forced to use MS at work but at home I dont let their software past my router. A buddy of mine stayed for a few days while his place was being fixed. "Hey, why are my updates not happening?" "Oops, I forgot to tell you that all MS servers are inaccessible via the wifi."
Surely you jest.
US v Microsoft, the antitrust case, was decided in 1998. Microsoft has always been a shitty company run by shitty people doing shitty things.
They enjoyed a brief upwell in public relations during the period when they had first seemingly embraced open source with WSL, GitHub, and maybe dotnet core, but it was merely a blip.
Being overtly anti-consumer is baked into Microsoft's DNA. They'll always return to that baseline.
And for reselling you the same office suite every couple of years.
(Full disclosure, I worked there in the 2000s... So if anything I should be biased the other way.)
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
Bill Gates the ruthless business-nerd was definitely a stereotype 30 years ago, though to your point I don't remember anyone talking about them revoking licenses for purchased software.
I don’t think this is related at all.
I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.
"...run one instance of the software on your device (the licensed device), for use by one person at a time... In this agreement, “device” means a local hardware system (whether physical or virtual) with an internal storage device capable of running the software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a device. For purposes of this agreement, “device” does not include any hardware system (whether physical or virtual) on which the software is installed or accessed solely for remote use over a network.
this license does not give you any right to ... use the software as server software or to operate the device as a server; use the software to offer commercial hosting services; make the software available for simultaneous use by more than one user over a network; install the software on a server for remote access or use over a network; or install the software on a device for use only by remote users
This license allows you to install only one instance of the software for use on one device, whether that device is physical or virtual. If you want to use the software on more than one virtual device, you must obtain a separate license for each instance.
Microsoft may require you to activate the software over the Internet in order for you to use the software. ... The software may periodically and automatically reconnect to the Internet to confirm the license associated with the licensed device. If you do not reconnect your device to the Internet when required as part of the activation or reactivation process, the software may operate with reduced functionality.
We hope we never have a dispute, but if we do, you and we agree to try for 60 days, upon receipt of a Notice of Dispute, to resolve it informally. If we can’t, you and we agree to binding individual arbitration before the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury. ... Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, requests for public injunctions and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed."
https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/docume...
Is a layer of LLM going to make this better or worse? Could you train a model to be very good at it?
We should all know what happened when the US government turned on Colossus (D.F.Jones 1966) and it immediately found there was another. That collaboration was humanities near instant undoing.
To answer your second question, yes, I think it's inevitable that LLMs will become very proficient with all commonly used file formats.
https://www.libreoffice.org/
https://www.onlyoffice.com/
(it's AGPL... there is an ongoing dispute with a fork now)
And Macs are bundled with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, all of which are excellent.
10% of users with MacOS Office 2019 installs just got NERF'd by Microsoft. This story will not encourage users to spend more money on a disappearing rabbit trick. =3
They sold a perpetual product that broke in sync for every user, and the reason it is breaking is because of a license checking feature.
Not an easy case, but it could be argued they advertised a product as perpetual while it's effectively an X years license.
The fact that the breakage is related to the license might be relevant, you can stop supporting license checks, but do it to the benefit of users, not conveniently to their detriment as an upsale mechanism
I'm guessing that's the situation for several others though there could be other use cases that's Excel only.
Instead of pressing Microsoft, it would probably make sense to force such vendors (SAP, Oracle etc) to release their office add-ons for Libre office.
That'll kill two very profitable birds with one stone.
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
As an aside, have you seen Typst? It’s got LaTeX-level typesetting quality but the markup syntax is a lot friendlier (close to Markdown) and the scripting language is a Real Language™ with sensible error messages and sub-second compilation times even for big documents.
Why? Just to upgrade or what?
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.
$ sudo pacman -S libreoffice
They are responsible for awesome sales of MacBook Neo.
Like, they're up there with crypto companies in the category of "This outcome was so inevitable that if you didn't expect it, maybe you should consider finding a legal guardian"
Any "big enough" organisation will eventually do something stupid, disgraceful, or even illegal. Once you have over a hundred thousand staff, there's just no way to guarantee that they all row in the same direction and nobody gives in to the temptation to cut corners or outright cheat.
If you think you can judge the entire rest of an organisation by a few bad actors within it, you'll be perpetually disappointed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.
Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …
Buy yourself something nice every month with the money you save.
https://massgrave.dev/
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRnno9VIZx0
If Apple can release updates for ancient iOS versions to update certificates years after the fact, then these fucking assholes can do the same. The auto-update functionality is there. They are choosing not to use it.
Only makes sense on an airgapped system that will never exchange files with the outside world.
Unfortunately this kind of thing will continue since Microsoft can survive any slap on the wrist that might come their way for their sleazy practices. They've done it countless times throughout their existence. It has been paying off enough for them to keep doing it.
Exactly. As such I no longer consider them accountable when they do this kind of thing. It's the buyers' fault for not voting for better with their wallets, and I have 0 sympathy for them.
perpetual has pejorative connotations and only started appearing in marketing speak when software rental became the new business model.
...and I'd almost be willing to bet that, as usual, the cracked version will remain perfectly functional.
Never fails to impress how utterly Orwellian these big techs can be.
How do I do that?
This is exactly the sort of scenario where I do not feel bad at all tracking down an online crack that disables the certificate check.
That said, it is probably not in Microsoft's best interest for people to have a legitimate reason to discover how much easier life can be if you pirate software.
Presumably we’ll know soon if network firewalling the licensing server helps, but I expect it’ll just delay the intentional failure by a few months at best.
maybe i'll eventually get a settlement for my multiple Office Mac licenses that won't buy me a latte. what a joke.
note to self: never buy anything from MSFT ever again.
The point would not be so much to help the customers but to cause the actual cost to Microsoft to be sufficiently high as to disincentivize corrupt behavior.
Class action lawsuits usually end up with settlements where the offender pays much less than the harm they caused, and those harmed get almost nothing. Even if it does go all the way to a court verdict, the sentence is usually insufficient. And the process is long and expensive.
I don't really know what the solution is, but the current system clearly isn't working. And I don't think it was really designed for the scale of mega corporations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341968
Yep. It's difficult to say that the folks in the country are free when they often have to surrender their right to access the courts to get jobs, health insurance, medical care, access to telecommunications, shelter, delivery services, bill-payment services, etc, etc, etc, and obligate themselves to arbitration that nearly always gags both parties.
AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion was a monstrous decision. Arbitration was always an option. If you have to force people to choose the dispute resolution option you claim is cheaper [0] and fairer, odds are good that it's neither of those things.
[0] Remember when -IIRC- Doordash plead with Federal court to permit it to move its mass arbitration into court because the arbitration was too expensive (and how they got their ass kicked out of court)? Remember how like a month later, all the arbitration companies magically got a "We will handle no more than twenty complaining parties at once. All yall bitches got to get in line." clause in their rules governing mass arbitration? Yea, "good" times.
So, no.
You lose access to it. You’re cooked.
But I'm fun at parties, I swear :P
But it does reminds me of when Garmin GPS would make the storage filesystem limited to say, 3GB of read size, then offer "lifetime map updates" while knowing that in a few years the new map size will not be readable on old Garmin devices.
You sound like a shill trying to muddy the waters. It’s petty clear when they silently change their web pages to delete features sold that it’s quite deliberate or did they accidentally do that too? Do you have a direct or indirect relationship with microsoft perchance or just missed it in TFA maybe?
Look we're using encryption; you like that right? More encryption == more secure == your peers will attack you if you don't like it.
/s
Why not both? I mean, if you leave your keys in your car and the window down, the car thief is definitely the one who should go to jail, but you're still an idiot.
I do agree that you have to be a special kind of stupid to take people to task for trusting Microsoft "perpetual" licenses while yourself trusting Google much more. I mean, just using Google in the first place is even dumber than buying the Microsoft license, but that's above and beyond the call.