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Comment by f4stjack | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, Microsoft wants you to move to a Microsoft 365 subscription. As an example, 6-7 months ago an update made Outlook 2016 clients fail to connect to the Outlook servers. You had to explicitly set an update (its KB escapes me at the moment) to make it connect again.

There are other issues as well, Onedrive, Office 2016 and Windows 11 combination has problems - Word and Excel crashes with no rhyme or reason, some documents which were not shared ask for credentials for accessing and so on.

Also there is the fact that they declared that 2016 and 2019 won't be eligible for connecting to Microsoft 365 services after October 2023 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/endofsupport/...). So there is a clock ticking if you are using those versions of Office.

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> 2016 and 2019 won't be eligible for connecting to Microsoft 365 services after October 2023

I wonder how that will affect the Business Basic subscriptions. Everyone uses those for Exchange, but they don’t include Outlook. Business Standard is a bad deal for small businesses vs buying a perpetual version of Office.

Im still upset about the change from device based to user based licensing too. I use several (user) profiles to silo my own work and I’m not buying 4 Office subscriptions.

I really hope the whole cloud subscription thing opens a door for competition and comes back to haunt them. For example, I’d love to host my own instance of Only Office so I can send people files and have them edit online with authentication happening via magic links. It’s not quite there yet because the installation is too cumbersome.

I honestly believe the biggest barrier to entry in the Office space was that everyone used to need MS Office to edit files out of band. Once it’s 100% cloud, I think competition becomes more viable. At least I hope so.

I switched to LibreOffice. MS Office has regressed dismally since its heyday in the '90s, and now with Microsoft's offensive hounding to "log in with your Microsoft account" at every goddamned turn it's simply unacceptable.

I made the mistake of buying Windows computers for my parents, because that's what they're used to. Microsoft's execrable policies and design made setting these up a clinic on how to piss customers off. Widespread UI defects... bafflingly disorganized design... disregard for user selections... and then the continual hounding hounding hounding for a "Microsoft account." For months, my parents would occasionally call me because Office would stop working and demand credentials (mine, of course, since it was my license).

So I finally shitcanned all of it and installed LibreOffice and Thunderbird (which has improved drastically in the 20 years since I've looked at it). But I still regret not getting them at least one Mac. I have plenty of issues with Apple UI decisions, but Windows and Office are such a shitshow at this point that the Mac looks like a finished product while Windows looks like a failed project cobbled together from... I don't even know what.

> From my experience, Microsoft wants you to move to a Microsoft 365 subscription

Yes, they want the money.

> So there is a clock ticking if you are using those versions of Office.

My solution is Office 2007 (for 32 bit) or 2010 (for 64 bit), either running on Wine or baremetal, and replacing Outlook.com by Gmail.com to which old versions of Office connect perfectly well thanks to Google Workspace Sync.

How do you obtain a 2007 or 2010 copy?

A website that may or may not contain magnet links.

You'd think those magnets would go rusty in the bay...

$20 and ebay, same place and just little more if you want it NIB.

A certain site that has the words "The" "pirate", "bay" and org in its URL. It's where a friend of a friend that I know through a second cousin stumbled upon their frequently used copy of Office 2007 (and quite a few other things)...

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