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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

There is a serious threat to Microsoft here, if everyone starts using AI for generating and updating Office docs. At some point Office will become just a viewer.

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im stoked for that outcome, standard document tooling should not live behind subscription models anymore. i dont care that microsoft spent zillions bankrolling education systems and companies to fall into this cultural lock in over the decades

whether they like it or not spreadsheets word docs etc are just ubiquitous parts of existing in society at this point you're gonna need to reach for these tools eventually just to apply for jobs or do homework

You assume tokens will be free after these get their monopoly positions? Actual libre office is actual open source running on weak hardware. Truly free.

And I suspect we will look back at MS with nostalgia once Altman and Musk get their ai imperiums.

Need is a bit strong, you can absolutely apply and do homework without, e.g. using Typst or Latex or whatever else is out there

Don't worry, they are ahead of this.

Satya said some time ago that they expect soon to have more agents using Microsoft software than humans, and are working on transitioning their focus from serving humans to serving agents.

https://www.news18.com/business/satya-nadella-announces-micr...

So they will switch to per-agent pricing instead of per-user. Fine, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft Office will become a just bunch of viewers as far as human usage is concerned. As far as generating Office documents, you can do that without using any Microsoft code.

... and without the license, crucially!

This is one that's already true and "everyone" hasn't figured it out yet. But you don't really even need Office as a viewer, PDF is fine (for printable/portable fixed-layout) or just HTML. "Office" is a product that doesn't need to exist anymore, at least for the core apps. For day-to-day office work, you probably shouldn't be using those legacy apps, you should be reviewing portable document formats and asking an agent to make the revisions that you want.

> For Microsoft, this shift means products like M365 will act as the foundational layer where AI agents operate. Users will still need places to store documents, manage projects, search files, and track workflows

They bet on the online office suite (M365).

But why would openai and antrhopic pay them if they already libreoffice for free and why would users pay if they already have an Ai subscription

This sentiment is also why Microsoft crushed earnings this quarter. Their AI play is to create corpo-slop AI middleware, which sits between AI models and enterprise applications. Sure, others can go and build harnesses which can generate MS office documents, but MS is already doing it, and conveniently such harnesses will come with everyone's existing Microsoft 365 subscription.

The analogy is IBM. Just like IBM helped every old-money corporation on the planet figure out the whole "computers" thing 50 years ago, MS will help everyone solve the "AI" thing. The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money

> The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money

Microsoft’s goal isn’t to provide high quality software that outperforms other software, their goal is to provide an obvious and reasonably proximate answer to clueless execs trying to check things off of a procurement list so that existing contracts can snowball and competition is excluded.

We, collectively as a global species, really lost out when MS wasn’t divvied up in their anti-trust trial. Office as its own corporate entity would be in a radically different place right now, as would their enterprise customers.

I have not created or read any Word document for a very long time. I only create PowerPoint presentations a few times a year for work, which could be easily replaced with PowerPoint online or Google Slides or even just some markdown files.

But I have a license for the entire office 365 including Copilot premium.

Guess why?

For Excel?

I think they meant to view documents.

Likewise with PDF editing via AI. Way nicer than having to pay Adobe or some other shady software vendor for PDF editing ability.

If you don't have to edit files or you are not supposed to, they should send you a PDF, unless it's an Excel. Excel is a much better viewer for itself because of many reasons (explore the formula, sort, filter) including that usually its sheets are not built to fit a particular page format.

Haven't used MicrosoftOffice in the past 7 years.

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