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Comment by DomenicoMazza | Hacker News Reader

This change would go against multiple consumer guarantees in Australia where it's 1) a right to have undisturbed possession of a product 2) products must be fit for the advertised purpose https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-servic... Microsoft would be breaking consumer law if the change goes ahead for the perpetual licenses they sold in Australia

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And this won't be their first time breaking Australian Consumer Law... Twelve months ago no less!

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...

The ACCC is going to love this.

Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.

They're working on it, they've recently stopped allowing the Australian government to be treated a single customer. [1]

While each agency still gets the same whole of government pricing for the next five years, I worry the next step is to make each agency negotiate their own individual licences, which squeezes the smaller ones with no bargaining power.

[1]: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/fed-gov-faces-major-m365-lice...

More incentives to move off MS products. MS sales and marketing are just geniuses! I hope one day they will eat the consequences.

We've been waiting 40 years for that "one day". I wouldn't bet on it. :(

This doesn't happen without a lot of hard work. Want to help? See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/07/how-i-got-the-uk-government... for inspiration.

Microsoft's key customers aren't consumers, its business and government: specifically enterprise licensing agreements. If Microsoft seriously upset business and governments, they wouldn't be profitable, if in business at all, not long after that.

Because of Microsoft's dominant position considering near ubiquitous penetration of Microsoft Office in government, one part of government will slap Microsoft on the wrist for anti-consumer practices, whilst other parts will still continue to purchase Office (and other products) because there simply isn't another product that competes directly feature-by-feature and compatibility (and usability in part), which matters in (often archaic) government processes.

It would cost far too much money to try to migrate away, at least at this point. Euro-Office[1] seems poised, if not likely, to dramatically shift that balance once it becomes a key part of EU government machinery.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to Euro-Office. If it takes off, it could invigorate other government efforts to fork Euro-Office and replace Microsoft's suite of tools. Someone just needs to put the business case to the relevant federal government stakeholders comparing the cost of (on-going) licensing vs. the cost of building an internal development team to maintain a fork for their whole-of-government machinery.

Given that there is a fair bit of EU and NATO overlap population-wise, if a significant portion of EU-based NATO countries adopt Euro-Office exclusively, I would suggest Euro-Office then poses an existential threat to Microsoft Office, and perhaps Microsoft's business productivity pursuits.

The moat that software companies had back in the 90s and 2000s before the Internet really took off, was distributing software by physical media. The Internet (as much as I have nostalgia for physical media) completely obliterated that model for mass-distribution productivity software, and indeed many others.

I'm certainly keen to give Euro-Office a test run, since the code is freely available (on GitHub too, ironically[2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro-Office [2] https://github.com/Euro-Office

Microsoft is actually large enough to start their own country. They'd just pull out of all government contracts all at once.

Since a lot of what Microsoft sells is snake oil, we'll just have the US liberate Microsoftland in that case.

> Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft

You don't need to imagine it: the comment you are replying to links to a press release from a Government agency "going after Microsoft". And yet somehow we haven't seen Microsoft stop doing business with the Australian government.

If "going after" means continuing to give them more and more money, one might question what you actually mean by "going after" ...

"Going after" means enforcing the law against them. Nothing more, nothing less.

In this context 'enforcing the law' means letting them get away with (via token inconsequential fines or the like) and then giving them even more money.

Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to make money. I don't know what kind of weird projection power fantasy roleplaying is going on in your head, but Microsoft is not going to cut off Australia even if they are made to honour this petty little clause that will not actually cost them anything. And even if it did, it wouldn't really matter. It's a relationship of convenience. A country can figure out an alternative if it really mattered, MS is not integral in any way, using it is just the path of least resistance. Something like ASML embargoing a country would actually be a threat, but Microsoft is very replaceable.

> Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers.

People keep saying this but so far as I can tell, thinking you're above the law and punishing customers who don't like your company's behavior is a viable business model.

Maybe in the US, but not globally, which is the subject here. MS has been fined billions and made adjustments to its software due to the court cases in the EU, and it did not, in fact, decide to block the entire EU out of spite but simply adhered to the judgments.

"Microsoft won't get very far as a business if [they do what they've been doing for decades]"

Story doesn't check out.

Microsoft has been cutting off the EU and Australia for decades? That's news to me!

Microsoft themselves won’t do that. They are already under severe scrutiny internationally for fear of the US using Microsoft as leverage. They don’t want to stoke those fears. Once they do something like this, everyone who has been saying “stick with Microsoft services, they are the cheapest option compared to doing it ourselves, and have the lowest business continuity risk” will lose that argument at the same time. That creates a massive and clear opportunity for credible competitors to rise up.

This type of action would be like Trump in Iran “I am do much more powerful than you, so submit or suffer the consequences” can trivially backfire, and really reduces the effectiveness of your power.

Just because someone doing something would be stupid and self destructive long term doesn’t mean they won’t do it.

Microsoft wouldn't do that, because it would drive away other customers too. Maybe Australia would fold or maybe they would tough it out, but most other nations (and companies!) would start thinking about how quickly they could transition away from Microsoft.

Interesting how this has generated such negative response.

I wonder why Microsoft has so many defenders here.

Also, the change in the title of the post makes what happened much less clear. Interesting how that just chanced to happen as well. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

Also, it's Office 2019, but they were officially selling it until the end of 2021, and third-party sellers were selling through their boxed inventory for years after too. So, this isn't even that old a piece of software.

And, let's not forget, this is trillion dollar corporation. They could find one of their Mac devs to write an update for this in a week. The negative publicity from this is measured in millions of dollars.

Presumably copilot could do it in record time.

(Right..?)

Yes, that's what i don't understand.

Original title: Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed offline products

The change in the title of the post makes what happened much less clear. Interesting how that just chanced to happen. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

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