Microsoft Will Cut Services to Standalone Office Users so They’ll Subscribe to Office 365

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
Standalone versions of Office are getting neutered a wee bit to make the subscription version more appealing: after Oct. 13, 2020, OneDrive and Skype for business will only continue to function for the latter. I don’t think these enterprise versions are relied on all that much, but this could be the start of more and more features being taken away from the perpetual versions of Office. Microsoft’s reasoning is security and feature compatibility.

…consumers who have already purchased “perpetual”—i.e., standalone—versions of Office, such as Office 2010, Office 2013, and Office 2016, would be cut off from accessing the business versions of OneDrive and Skype after mainstream support expires. Those who have purchases those Office suites will be allowed to connect until Oct. 13, 2020—the day mainstream support ends for Office 2016, and the day the new support policy kicks in.
 
hahaha....

Well onedrive is explicitly blocked where I work so hahaa
Skype/Lync would be annoying as it is very useful.
 
I guess Microsoft wants you to pay and then keep on paying.

WAAS: coming soon to a theater... er... an OS near you.
 
99% of everyone I know who uses office just uses it for Word and Excel, occasionally PowerPoint also. Some use Outlook but only with their own email servers.

OneDrive and Skype seem like two things that Microsoft are constantly pushing people to use, whether they want to or not, so the idea of them restricting access to those is nothing short of a sad joke.

I'd even go back to using Office 2003 before I ever switched to Office 365.
 
99% of everyone I know who uses office just uses it for Word and Excel, occasionally PowerPoint also. Some use Outlook but only with their own email servers.

OneDrive and Skype seem like two things that Microsoft are constantly pushing people to use, whether they want to or not, so the idea of them restricting access to those is nothing short of a sad joke.

I'd even go back to using Office 2003 before I ever switched to Office 365.

Even in the enterprise environments, 99% of users only use Word, Excel, Outlook, and powerpoint.

I have long said and will continue to say, we need to get past the point where we are allowing Microsoft to be seen as the only option. Both in Office applications and OS markets.
 
WAAS would suck. But I will then happen to be proficient in (name your distro) Linux.

I'm currently using Office Pro Plus 2013 but I'll have no problem moving over to LibreOffice.
 
I have long said and will continue to say, we need to get past the point where we are allowing Microsoft to be seen as the only option. Both in Office applications and OS markets.

A fragmented PC OS market would pretty much kill PC gaming IMO. It's hard enough to get game developers to make games even for just one computer OS.

In the end, Microsoft can't afford to alienate their customers, even the ones who don't use Office 365. Before they know it, Office would be as popular as Bing.
 
A fragmented PC OS market would pretty much kill PC gaming IMO. It's hard enough to get game developers to make games even for just one computer OS.

In the end, Microsoft can't afford to alienate their customers, even the ones who don't use Office 365. Before they know it, Office would be as popular as Bing.

That is true, at least for a time. I think it would be only a matter of time before it adapted though. It would be great news for Mac and Linux users as well. But I might be biased because the older I get the less I care about gaming anyway...

Edit: We already can for the most part replace most users computers with thin clients, but it would be hilarious to me if we got to the point where we could do this with raspberry pi esk machines lol.
 
Last edited:
limit onedrive?? if only. since the big win10 patch the other week every time im in libreoffice working on something and go to save as, onedrive pops open asking me to login..even though i have it set to not start on windows startup
 
ms-hits-fails_8-100343217-orig.jpg
 
Just wait till they block sending excel and word files from outlook.
To better align with the dynamic businesses of today, rather than sending an office file as an attachment, a link to the onedrive, office-365 object is sent. Multiple parties can enjoy the real-time collaborative nature of document editing [*]

[*] onedrive and office-365 is mandated
 
Even in the enterprise environments, 99% of users only use Word, Excel, Outlook, and powerpoint.

I have long said and will continue to say, we need to get past the point where we are allowing Microsoft to be seen as the only option. Both in Office applications and OS markets.

And Access!
 
OneDrive and Skype for Business. Which if you're using, you're probably already using O365. There are probably very few that are using the business versions of those with the standalone versions of Office. I don't see too many displaced by this. However, those that are should be pretty pissed.

For home users, they are using the regular OneDrive and Skype, not the business versions (which I believe is tied into Sharepoint).

Unless I'm wrong (and I'm reading the linked article wrong) and it's going to have an impact on the consumer side of things, in which case there is no excuse. Students, small business, home users would be affected and rightfully pissed off.

It's going to have minimal impact for most people and businesses, IMO. A lot of hoopla over nothing.
 
Are we sure they don't mean that those features won't work for just Office 2016 (and behind), with Office 2018 supporting it until 2022 and so fourth?

That'd seem to me that they're limiting the cloud support to 4 years going forward.
 
The best part is the people (I haven't seen any in this thread) who say that this isn't a precursor to subscription based OS's. The worst part is, that once that time comes, they'll defend it to the death.

r/windows10 is a cesspool of fucktards that eat shit like this up.
 
I just use LibreOffice, have for a long time now. At work though I can't get our IT guy to even consider it. His first excuse is"there isn't any tech support", Seriously, we use office to send memos and make basic spreadsheets, who would need any kind of support for that which you can't get on the internet.
 
Looks like the subscription strategy has been kicked up in to top gear now. Next target will be Windows.

Maybe, but I don't know. I don't see them going the subscription Windows option, at least not for all versions of Windows. I could see them having subscription versions of Windows as an option with full priced or OEM options as well, each with different feature sets.
 
Security and feature compatibility. Well, I have a full office ultimate 2007 and really, the file formats are the same as what we have today. There is very little that is different in the ribbon too. So write off features as a bullshit excuse. Next the security updates have to do with attacks to the files being mal-formed, etc. And since all of the versions use the same file formats, write off security as bullshit too.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Meeho
like this
How is libre office on .pub files ? i've never used word. i used noted pad wordpad and anything wordpad couldt handle i went directly to publisher.
 
Currently rolling out Windows 10 & Office 2016 to the office.
I disable both OneDrive and Skype for Business as we don't use them.
Most users only use Outlook, Word and Excel.
 
As the kids say, "what evs" I don't use Skype and I don't use One Drive, and while we sometimes use it at to communicate with a s/w vendor, we're just using plain old skype. Internally we use Pidgin(sp)
 
google is putting the office products out of business by 2020 - every child growing up and going to 3rd grade gets brought into the google ecosystem. most modern companies use Google to work and collaborate. many forture 500 companies are watching and planning to switch in the next 3 years. office 2016 is probably the final version... many companies will abandon Microsoft by 2020. in addition to saving a ton of money on licensing, you need to adapt to modern products and your new workforce which will all use google.
 
google is putting the office products out of business by 2020 - every child growing up and going to 3rd grade gets brought into the google ecosystem. most modern companies use Google to work and collaborate. many forture 500 companies are watching and planning to switch in the next 3 years. office 2016 is probably the final version... many companies will abandon Microsoft by 2020. in addition to saving a ton of money on licensing, you need to adapt to modern products and your new workforce which will all use google.
We'll see. The only time we use a Google app (sheets) is to track tasks for a big project where multiple people are updating it and for the deployments of those projects. For actual spec docs or test docs and so on, we use Word. Accounting is not using Google, they use Excel. And while I use Google docs at home for tracking some game stuff (mostly because I sometimes edit it on a tablet), I find Excel far easier to use (especially if I'm using Googles Sheets app on the tablet) and I'm not a power user, but if I could use Excel on an iPad (without a 360 sub), I would.

I will say that Google does a great job of importing an excel sheet into their app.
 
Eh, I've used Libreoffice for years now. I didn't even know Office 2016 was a thing. *looks at price* looks like Libreoffice is still the winner.
Just because it is "free" doesn't mean that it's really free. Learn to TCO.
 
I work for a large defense contractor and yes we use office / skype pretty heavily. We do not use cloud services anywhere as security is a top concern. I really wonder how this is going to pan out in the future.
 
I have the option of OneDrive and Skype in my Office. I don't use them at all. I also have absolutely zero plans on buying a Office 365. I only use the offline portions of Office anyways and seeing as I picked it up through a Home Use Program, it's cheaper than a year subscription of Office 365 too.
 
Back
Top