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Comment by gima | Hacker News Reader

I think anything is a great alternative to the Office at this point. In hindsight, LibreOffice's name must've been chosen by a fortune-teller..or a <strike>pessimist</strike> realist ;)

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what's so bad about Office? I just switched from LO to Office and it's felt like taking a huge weight off my shoulders - all the weird little UI quirks and bugs are gone, and everything just works.

My apologies. My reply was an attempt at political humor. No connection to the LibreOffice software.

LibreOFfice its playing catch up with MS Office actually. I am all for open source but Office is something that Microsoft really gets right and now with their subscription model it became very cheap for everyday users so unless you are on Linux you have very little reason not to use Microsoft's suite.

Why on earth would I want to pay each month for software?

I'd rather just pay one cost and use the product.

It gets regular updates. There is a version that you can just buy once, but it only gets updates for (I think) a year and then you have to buy a new one whenever you want an update.

The problem with this is: Office is pretty much feature complete for most uses, people don't need regular updates to their word processor. Microsoft has even removed quite a few features since the Office 97 days.

Retail Office gets updated about every three years. That's plenty, buying a subscription for Word seems hardly worth it.

Because the price is the same as buying it outright in the long run (assuming you use the newer versions as most do), its at least as good a deal as the outright purchase. For things that create value over the term of ownership, a subscription makes a lot more sense than a large up front cost. We do this model, but with more middlemen & machinations, for just about everything nowadays (houses, cars, student loans, etc.). The only difference is Microsoft isn't screwing you.

The value-add here is that Office comes with cloud storage, really great built-in sync, and a continuous stream of improvement. Amazingly, Office is still getting better, but now improvements are released by the month, not every 3-4 years.

It's more expensive to get the subscription even if you do upgrade regularly. And I don't think most people buy the latest version of Office with every release. And what "monthly improvements" are even needed? Office seems pretty feature complete for most use cases.

You also get several installs, cloud storage, and the IOS apps. I would buy it outright for home but for my users in the office the subscription model works great.

I personally use the home edition for my family. 4 family members have office / 1 TB onedrive with a single yearly subscription which is a fraction of the price I'd pay for a single perpetual license (and I have an extra user license to spare). It feels like a good value for me.

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