HackiNews

• nialse
  Casually opening a Word document to do some adjustments, a number of popups appeared. Word is disabled until buying a M365 license. It's not that it doesn't get updated, editing is disabled. How on earth do they get away with this?

  • Danox
    Don’t let them, just move on. The days are pretty much over in terms of using Microsoft Word at a personal level away from the office why? It doesn’t add anything special, the only program worth using is Excel. And even that is slowly fading away. Adobe and Quark are also declining too.

    • nialse
      It actually trigged installation of WordCraft to fix the document and export as pdf. Maybe it won't do everything Word does, but it did this task well. Now I'm willing to use it again, especially considering I don't want to subscribe for basic computer use.
  • d3Xt3r
    > How on earth do they get away with this?

    By having trillions of dollars, that's how. Even if they get hit with a lawsuit, it'll be some million dollar fine, which is chump change for them.

    The best way to deal with this is to not use their products in the first place. And now that we've got OnlyOffice and ArtCraft, there's almost no reason to continue using the MS Office suite, unless you're a corporate customer.

  • bell-cot
    How on earth do they...

    They are the 900# gorilla, and the screams of the smallfolk have no effect on their bottom line.

    • Danox
      They are sadly mistaken. Microsoft is slowly fading away to irrelevance. In fact, the age of Nandella is coming to an end I’ve said it before. “Microsoft does not know how to compete when the playing field is level” and the same applies to their evil twin Intel.

      • bell-cot
        You are thinking long-term. In the late-stage capitalist taxonomy, long term is a subspecies of lip service.
• mjbright
  The same thing happened to me yesterday on macOs with Excel, Word, and then I checked Powerpoint. All very clear thanks to the "you are shafted" status bar at the top of these tools. What disgusts me is that they could have just as easily announced this - via the same sort of status bar, in the tools during the last 5 months.

  But we shouldn't expect honesty from MS.

  Thankfully I've been able to move forward with - Google Docs to do an invoice yesterday (loaded from a .docx) - so I have a path forward - macOs Numbers for my Excel file I wanted to update yesterday

  I haven't yet decided for macOs Keynote or Google Slides supplemented by Claude AI to replace Powerpoint. This remains a major inconvenience but is the death knell of Microsoft for me (good grief - it took me until 2026 !!)

  Note: I would not at all have considered MS365 after a very bad "free trial" experience 3 years ago - the worst being trying to get help from MS support. Of course in the future support will be much easier from the MS chatbots (BAD JOKE).

  • mjbright
    I should add that I hadn't taken the time to read the original post. In the end having read the post I downgraded to an earlier Office (uninstalled/reinstalled using one of the packages from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-histo...) and disabled autoupdate as described here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5300516/....

    So I'm back on using Office ... but consider that I'm working on borrowed time.

• gnabgib
  This is in Mac-Office, the reporter apparently didn't see the outcry 5 months ago:

  Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (1015 points, 376 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341578

  Microsoft Deliberately Bricking All Office for Mac 2019/2021 Installations (16 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390461

  Microsoft Office 2019 for Mac Will Soon Stop Letting You Edit Documents (25 points, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48391060