4mo ago

Nobody wants Copilot Pro AI for Office 365 — so Microsoft will force-bundle it and raise the price

pivot-to-ai.com Nobody wants Copilot Pro AI for Office 365 — so Microsoft will force-bundle it and raise the price

Copilot Pro is an AI assistant for Microsoft Office 365, introduced in January. Based on nine months of feedback, Microsoft will generously bundle Copilot with all Personal and Family subscriptions…

23 comments

or just use LibreOffice
If you work in an office or for an office or are connected to an office ... let them pay for it and use the software on their systems.
It's also a great excuse to disconnect from the office anyway ... if someone calls you after hours to do work ... tell them you need to access your computer at the office and won't do the work until you get back to your desk.
Otherwise, if there is no requirement from anyone and you're just doing some word processing yourself at home or doing some basic spreadsheets ... just use Open Source Software ... there's plenty of them around.
- the catch is when you really need specifically O365 for some reason, e.g. we had to get the O365 download version for my kid's schooling because that was the specific version the "this is how you do office shit" classes were taught against, the online O365 didn't cut it
  of course even the teacher was telling the kids "look you should just use libreoffice" lol
  
  Is the school providing the license? because if they're not, then it is a rough call to require and force parents to pay for a non essential tool. This is why FOSS is such a powerful education ally. It doesn't cost any of the end users any money. This kind of things is why people still think MS products as the default. MS spent a lot of money in marketing to force education to treat them as such.
  
  That's the thing .... most people who are doing work themselves at home and for their own purposes, never need something like O365 ... when it comes to schooling it should be the same, unless the school is doing very specific particular thing just to justify using O365, then it shouldn't be required
  Word processing is very simple ... I have an old Underwood typewriter from 1921 ... I can write and format a letter using it if I wanted to ... it shouldn't be any more complicated than that.
  Microsoft pushing their software is just a cheap salesman selling snake oil that you don't need and doesn't do anything special.
- My mom will never grok LibreOffice.
  I tried to switch her for a long time but I gave up when she called me one day to complain that her coworker can't open a file she saved. Apparently the coworker in question was too, emm, talented to open an .odf
  There are things that are outside of human reach. I can't even put into words the strife that MSFT caused in my house when they switched Internet Explorer to Edge and thus "broke" her computer.

I hate AI as much as anyone, but this article is shitty fearmongering. Buried at the end it admits there's actually no price increase, there's just a new tier with optional features.
A “classic” Office 365 subscription will be available at the old price if you really don’t want the AI — for now.
- congrats on just learning about the corporation named “Microsoft”
  now fuck off
  
  consider the raw, stupid energy of reporting me to myself for violating a civility rule that doesn’t exist and never will
- Not really fear mongering, when Microsoft has proven that the "for now" is held up. Like the whole Recall fiasco. They canceled it "for now", and now it's published. Their "for now" is actually "for just right now, until heat subsides". Microsoft can go suck on a tailpipe.
  
  Australian users are already reporting they can't actually find the "classic" option at all.
- "for now" doing some extremely heavy lifting there

Nobody wants a fucking spy in the company. WTF!

23 comments