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Comment by boh | Hacker News Reader

If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted. There is literally no benefit to this subscription model besides paying for what you already have and what you don't want. None of this stuff needs to be on the cloud even for bigger firms. For the I need/like X in Office 365, it's not worth it from a costs perspective.

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I'd disagree in terms of the cloud capabilities. When it is used properly. The cloud stuff is very useful. I currently have a document that is going through multiple versions with about 8 people, with different expertise collaborating. Some have edit privs, some only have review. The ability for everyone to work on it simultaneously, with version history and no more document-v12-copy3_FINAL_FINALv2 is most welcome.

This is why Google Docs was so revolutionary... In 2006.

I cannot understand why they haven't got more traction today.

A company called Writely built it and google acquired it.

Multiplayer PowerPoint is the single largest advance in the business world since the spreadsheet.

If used properly.

The ironic thing about satire is that sometimes it is very difficult to tell apart from the thing being satirized.

So, like, was that satire? I got a good laugh out of "Multiplayer PowerPoint" either way.

If you heavily rely on Word and PowerPoint. I know several companies that almost never use those products except in limited situations (legal, keynote presentation etc). All "regular" discussions/presentations take place on Confluence/Notion/Quip etc. I wish my company did the same thing.

I think a surprising number of companies only survive because Microsoft Office gets around hostile internal IT departments and gives workers capabilities they can’t otherwise get on their locked down workstations.

It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.

I listened to the acquired podcast where they interviewed Steve Ballmer for a few hours. Very nice to get that perspective.

But he commented quite a bit on how office licensing changed and how that made MS filthy rich. Around Office 97 was when they started emphasizing getting the full office suite as a licensing option. Especially for companies this was a big deal because you would just get all the office applications; whether you needed them or not.

And then later around 2011 they figured out that companies really didn't like having to deal with having to buy a lot of office licenses every few years. So it became a yearly subscription instead and at that point the revenue increased again, a lot.

It's the progressive insight that transitioned MS from being windows OEM license dependent (office came with the PC) to being more dependent on recurring SAAS revenue. Companies actually prefer this model. Even though it costs them more.

I've been free from any MS licenses since I started working for startups on a mac. I occasionally use Google docs and gmail. But I haven't really done anything with Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint etc. since 2012. You don't need any of that stuff to run a company. The rare case I deal with a customer that insists on that stuff, they can just give me access to the web version. Or send a PDF. Or one an office file that usually opens fine in drive.

Bullshit. Just from a document editing perspective, going back to a network share where only one person can edit a doc is not going to fly. I used to have to deal with this as IT/desktop support and it fucking sucked. Docs in the cloud give you better collab capabilities and remove the need to have fancy networking, VPNs, international security exclusion groups etc, domain controller bullshit, connecting all of the companies offices together. Connect to the Internet, and all your stuff is there no matter where you are. It sounds like you've never had to support the infra for office workers before. This is way better than it used to be. For a small company, sure, do whatever. But the bigger it gets, the harder all that shit becomes and requires a lot of work to keep it running.

> If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted.

But what about the impact of increased productivity when not having to deal with the garbage that are New Teams and New Outlook? The employees would start doing more in lesser time and the companies could potentially make more profits too. Why would they want that if they could just be locked in with Microsoft month-on-month? /s

They’d get owned by security vulnerabilities in the first hour, fwiw.

Security has not been Microsoft’s priority for many years now. The CEO just says some words that don’t mean anything.

Ah yes security, the ultimate shakedown mechanic. Tony Soprano should've been in software sales. "You don't want anything happen to your nice little business do you??"

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