Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98.
SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
Not that I want to encourage people to keep using Microsoft products.
For the sake of conversation, though, there's SoftMaker Office:
https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office
But they're a subscription too. You save only $20 a year for less features than Office 365 as well (especially the lack of an email program). For most people, that savings and "no Microsoft" isn't enough.
> LibreOffice
No.
I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".
I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).
Maybe you got in before they enshittified too :)?
Glad I snagged it when I did (though admittedly it was probably a bad impulse purchase since I don't really animate much anymore).
I got a license to Moho from a Humble Bundle like a year ago, and I think Toonz is open source nowadays, all in addition to the ToonBoom copy I have so I probably don't need the real Adobe Animate anymore.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.
I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.
running a VM just for occasional office use is annoying to deal with
edit: activation is probs the main issue
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete.
Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.
Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.
And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.
This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.