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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah though FWIW, the overall impact of companies realizing maybe they shouldn't be spending $100k a year on a document editor is likely to raise all boats for alternatives.

It remains really wild people think Office is worth $30/month/user. Anything that erodes that belief is a net positive.

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i dont think anyone thinks it's worth that on its own, but you need some kind of user management (entra id in this case), some kind of cloud storage (sharepoint in this case) and some kind of standard document format (docx, xlsx, pptx in this case) in any company.

of course you can do all that with open source stuff but office is just easy to buy and hard to get rid of once you have bought in. the bigger your company the harder it is to migrate.

Entra ID is separate if you don't want logins from Nigeria. One of the most insane-to-me things is Office 365 is basically "open access by default" and you have to pay $6/month/user to fix it. Most people don't realize just how much attack surface they open up moving their data to the cloud, and that it costs a lot to even start to get back towards a secure environment like you had on-premise.

But yeah, the lock-in effect is huge. Microsoft cloud products deliberately don't work well with anything but more of their own cloud products. And as soon as you start a migration to it based on what you need, you suddenly realize how much other stuff you also need to pay them for. And you can't escape without replacing all of it.

I think a lot of people forget about the labor costs of migrating. The $30/mo looks cheap compared to all of the time spent trying to teach end users how to use something else

Part of the potential of these vibe coded clones is that the UI and workflows will be very similar to the genuine Microsoft products. So if they're actually completed and debugged then a migration won't necessarily require end user retraining.

You've fallen prey to the "Everyone is stupid except me" fallacy.

By the time you add cloud-storage space integration (SharePoint), live collaborative editing, support hotline, support for 30 year old macros, and Active directory user integration, you'll be charging the same per seat.

But hey, proof me wrong please. Code it.

> support hotline

Have you... ever tried talking to Microsoft support?

Paying for software is perfectly fine. If people don’t want to pay for office there isn’t a lack of alternatives at all. Google doc is right here for them to use of they want a free cloud version.

The idea that companies with subscriptions are extorting users is cancerous nonsense

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