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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

But what consequences will a really large company face for such a prominent disaster? They got what they wanted, which is an excuse to force everyone into paying for new AI products through price increases forced into enterprise contract renewals. It is the same thing that Google just did with Google Workspace or Google Apps or whatever their office suite is called now, where everyone is forced to pay for their new Gemini AI features even if they don’t want it.

The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit. They are achieving that, so for them this isn’t a disaster. They are doing that through illegal bundling, and preventing anyone else from competing for the same revenue fairly. To me that is the real disaster, because it is undermining the startup ecosystem.

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The startup ecosystem in which the goal is to get bought to be killed by the monopolies would help us how anyway?

My point was that any deserving and more helpful product that is not from Microsoft or Google will not see any revenue because customers are already being forced to pay for Microsoft or Google’s AI products.

We did an enterprise license renewal with them last summer. They offered and we accepted a purchase of a large block of m364 license in exchange for a substantial discount in the overall price. Worked for us, worked for them, so no complaints there. We are measuring engagement and time-savings per user and we are doing pretty good on the engagement side while time savings side is barely breaking even (comparing the price of the product versus monetary value of the time saved per user on a monthly basis).

Is m364 the same as m365 but without AI? What is the SKU?

As far as I can tell, they didn’t do this price increase on the business/enterprise SKUs at all. Copilot is still an add on for any of the integration with Office.

(Something the UI reminds you of if you’re on a business plan without it, if you click the button it offers to request a license from your admin unless they remembered to turn that off.)

> The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit.

Unfortunately, it's much worse - logically, such stunts are detrimental to revenue in the long term if they lead to loss of customer confidence. But they don't care about that, they are doing this to hype up and remove legitimate skepticism for "AI" products among the investor class and solidify the bubble.

AI is the next big thing suckers, look how all of our customers are using it. WDYM we "forced" it on them, just shut up and buy MSFT

You should have seen the great deal I got on LibreOffice from TDF!

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