I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
The clippy we all deserved
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn’t add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it’s almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
To please the shareholders. Then, when AI is no longer deemed valuable and its tremendous costs sink in, they will remove it and layoff the teams that worked on it, to please the shareholders.
But they’ll keep the prices high
That’s way too simplistic, as often.
For the shareholders, having an investment of several billions turn into an unwanted add-on for a few dollars is not a good thing. It’s the opposite, almost like a fire sale.
It’s not for you. It’s for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
And then what? Also, that won’t be legal in the EU.
I mean, you take billions of dollars to develop an AI to put into a product you already have, making it less competitive in the process to … develop a slightly better AI maybe?
Where exactly is the return on investment here?
I don’t disagree [with your comment (I absolutely disagree with what ms is doing)].
However, like with all technology in the past, where the civilian market received the obsolete military technologies (think, internet, cellphones, gps, and wifi), the consumer facing LLM/AI capabilities are likely nowhere near what the bleeding edge is in the military sector. The consumer facing Copilot is a product to make it “legal enough” to harvest your data, and the EULA people agreed to without reading is the nail on the coffin in that defense. The end product has nothing to do with copilot, office, or even us civilians. We’re just the vehicle.
[Edit in brackets]
Why would this not be legal in EU if the conditions of using the copilot are clearly stated in the agreement? GDPR etc is mostly just that: requirement for clear language + informed consent.
The AI hardware isn’t for us. It’s for Google and Microsoft, so they can steal your computer’s CPU time and hard drive space so they can build their own personal Skynets. (Same thing with CoPilot, which requires 50gigs of your hard drive space. You’re also paying for the privilege of being spied on, which is nice for them, I guess.)
First thing I do with the Google Assistent on Android Phones is to tell it to disable itself. Cool thing is that it does.
You can do that??
Just call the sales team and get the classic plan. No more having to deal with Copilot and you get the old price back.
Meanwhile, smart people: I sure do love Libre Office.
Libre Office.
Honestly - and flame away - I hate the name. I hate saying it. It’s the ‘moist’ of borrowed words. Leeeeeeeebr. And I’m a Canadian who did French up to university-level conversational “explain something for 20 min” French (from a gorgeous caribbean dynamo teacher, but I justif–uh, digress) so I know how to say the word and what it means.
And I still hate it. I’m a horrible person – even before I continued French study because the prof was so engaging and energetic and brightened every room and every day and made French interesting just on inclusion.
Lee-bray
I pronounce it AbbyWord and Gnumeric. I’m too old to have need of a full office suite anymore-- Libre or not.
Lee-ber
Absolutely not
Lee-bra, like libra
Glad I’m not the only one questioning the name! I have a pet theory that if they changed it it’d be more popular.
I feel bad for canadians learning french. It’s a language that’s only useful in like, 1.5 places in the world.
I genuinely believe french canadians are hurting their next generation by filling their heads with nonsense of a dying culture. Kind of like how racists fill their kids’ heads with garbage because they’re afraid of becoming irrelevant.
There are over three hundred
thousandmillion people speaking it. On all continents. It’s fairly useful. Maybe you should travel more.Over three hundred thousand million people? On all continents?
Ok, I mistyped, it’s three hundred million. Don’t know where that thousand came from. :)
Looks like if I want to learn French, I’ll be able to speak it in:
-France
-A few place in Canada that also speak English
-France’s colonies in Africa
-A tiny country in South America most people can’t name by looking at this picture
I rest my case. French canadians are pretentious about the significance of the french language. They don’t want to admit it’s a niche language and they want to waste people’s time learning it in schools because they had to waste their time learning it. They don’t want to admit it was and still is a waste of time and energy for those who are not predominantly interested in specifically French/French canadian culture.
Source for picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_French_speakers
It’s ok, you don’t have to learn French, nobody’s forcing you.
If smart people love libreoffice, then I must be dumb. Working with it always seems weird and I never like it.
Fortunately, I can use LaTeX for work; it is far from without issues but while being arcane sometimes (especially when tables are involved), it never really upsets me and the result looks very good. I can say neither for libreoffice or MS office. But at least the former doesn’t charge for the experience.
I hope typst gains more traction; it seems really intuitive compared to TeX and you don’t necessarily need a macro package. And while it doesn’t produce the quality of TeX-based systems yet, it is already good. Then again, Knuth’s goal first and foremost goal was quality (and it shows); the system just had to be usable by him.
Don’t forget GPT4All or JanAI, for those rare instances that you want to converse with a dumbass.
OnlyOffice for those feeling that Office style itch.
You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.
You don’t have to contact them anymore.
That’s what the support person said to me as well, but I didn’t get that option when I tried to cancel the subscription. My guess is that it wasn’t rolled out globally just yet, so if anyone didn’t find this option you can just contact the sales team to downgrade.
This should be illegal.
I agree.
For existing customers, the price hike won’t be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the “Classic” or “Basic” Microsoft 365 plans.
Thankfully we can roll back to the “Classic Family Plan” without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn’t see this article I’d be up for a big price hike when it renewed.
Everyone experiencing this should be thinking “man, I gotta ditch Microsoft before they try to fuck me again”
NO one using Microsoft is doing so by choice. If we haven’t learned in 30 years, then fuck us.
Their office suite is still the winner.
Not really. Office software has reached diminishing returns over a decade ago.
Nah, it’s all hinges on Excel. It’s still unbeatable at this point.
Absolutely. This has made me acutely aware that my days with MS are numbered.
But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back.
Should be illegal.
“You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we’re done half baking it into all our apps and now we’re almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all.”
The logic of the utterly deranged…
They did the same with 3.5 jack removal from phones, charged more for less
So glad I got a free phone from Visible after they were going to update their network and claimed my Galaxy S8 wouldn’t be compatible.
Best phone I ever had, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Suck on that, apple losers.
Oh shit maybe we’ll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
Yeah. So it’s
- thunderbird
- some add-on
right? I forget the name of that add-on.
No, that’s not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that’s it. But it’s only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let’s ask Co-pilot again:
THERE it is.
But I learned there’s a second alternative, so that’s cool. See? Co-pilot has value!
Like using Edge to download Firefox, I approve
Zentyal replaces windows server. It has active directory, file server, print server, domain controller and mail server, all in a way compatible with Microsofts products, but it’s Linux. I worked with it many years ago and it did what it says on the tin. I haven’t worked with newer versions.
In this case the AI is kinda wrong. It’s not a Thunderbird replacement in any way, rather an OWA replacement and Exchange alternative. You could use Thunderbird to connect to it probably.
What you could use is the Thunderbird extension TbSync, or Owl. Both work, but TbSync is free.
is there a thunderbird equivalent that looks like it was made after 1992?
I keep seeing posts by NextCloud on Mastodon. Has anyone had any experience using those guys?
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nextcloud is awesome, highly recommend.
This is for the personal licenses, not business or enterprise.
wack
Wait, they think people want Copilot? Like enough to pay money for it?
They are banking on customers being too invested in office to switch.
I think that might be their plan for all their products at this point. Just existing though inertia.
For reasons I won’t get into, I had a chance to peruse the training program for the sales force of Azure and their strategy actually is telling their potential clients that they already subscribe to Office 365 so they might as well use their cloud too.
Yeah, it does not surprise me. The thing that does is how common the approach seems to be in big established tech companies. I mean, it generally never works out (look at IBM, Intel, Sun, and to some degree Apple).
It’s a safe bet. I wonder if enterprise pricing is that high.
That with a side of suppressing a competitor. Similar to how they include Teams for corporate plans. If it is included in your M$ apps suite, then your company might want to cut back on Slack and just make due.
MS teams sucks so fucking much, I don’t understand how such a large company can make such a deficient product.
Copilot Is literally ChatGPT With a diff logo and name.
I use both for work, copilot is worse.
It’s “ENTERPRISE”
They don’t, but by providing a “classic tier” they get to kill anyone’s argument against it by saying “just don’t get it”, until they then discontinue the “classic tier” due to a “lack of demand”, and force Office users to have AI and pay for it too.
Copilot for Teams is extremely useful. Recap meetings and being able to search for specific parts. People hate on AI but in this case they are definitely downplaying the capabilities.
But to be fair I’m not the one paying the bill
Man, I don’t know about even that… It gets stuff wrong all the time. My boss LOVES his AI bot that joins all meetings (even if he doesn’t) to summarize stuff. Occasionally I look over the summary it produces; it’s about 50% actually correct, 25% ambiguous not wrong but not what I meant, and 25% flat out wrong / opposite of what I meant. I’m sure he relies on the results, ugh. One time I went through the summary and corrected it all, but I don’t have time for that for all meetings.
Copilot in my experience is pretty accurate, even if not perfect. Plus it timestamps the meeting so you know where it’s drawing it’s conclusions from.
If meetings are happening so long and going in so frequently that nobody can make sense of them without an ai summary, might I suggest there are too many meetings?
I say this as someone who used to work at a place that had meetings about meetings to figure out why so much time was wasted in meetings.
I mean we can debate root cause and corporate culture and everything, but at the end of the day these meetings exist and copilot make them better.
I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it’s 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.
Think of all the new words made since 2007 you won’t be able to write on such an old version.
I will forever hate 2007’s ribbon with a passion.
Microsoft probably added or changed unnecessary shit to the OOXML format that your old version can’t handle.
Do all documents open without any problems?
Me too haha. One of the first things I install.
It hasn’t.
Clippy is back!
GOZER The choice is made. The Traveller has come. VENKMAN We didn't choose anything?!! I didn't think of an image, did you? SPENGLER No. WINSTON My mind's a total void! [They all look at Ray] RAY I couldn't help it! It just popped in there! VENKMAN What? What just popped in there?
SPENGLER I have a radical idea... The door swings both ways. We could reverse the particle flow through the gate... RAY How? SPENGLER ... we'll resize a table in Word VENKMAN Excuse me, Egon. You said resizing a table was bad... RAY [with realisation] ... resize the table... VENKMAN You're going to endanger us. You're going to endanger our client; the nice lady who paid us in advance before she turned into a dog SPENGLER Not necessarily. There's definitely a very slim chance we'll survive.. WINSTON ... RAY ... VENKMAN I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! Let's do it!
It looks like you’re summoning a minor demon!
If they dressed it up as Clippy I wouldn’t be mad, tbh.
For anyone who doesn’t already know the good FOSS alternatives:
- Local: Libreoffice
- Cloud/self-hosted: Nextcloud Office
additionally Onlyoffice (But Onlyoffice isnt fully open source)
OnlyOffice, you say?
😏
OnlyOffice doesn’t like open document formats though.
Oh
FOSS GPT: GPT4ALL
worlds most over glorified over priced office website that runs like a slug
Fuck the MS suite is such garbage. My work was sold in for Teams with all the BS. Now I have to either map up the filepath creating what we used to have, or I can’t see the file folder and make a call at the same time. Onenote with it’s arbitrary syncing. And good luck finding it again since it stored at some random place if you loose access.
Word and excel is decent, but for a person who likes to tinker with versions it’s a nightmare to invite people to edit it.
Cluncky interface, slow and bloated all around
The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.
It’s very “lipstick on a pig”, but you can run the PWA side by side with the native desktop. I have many screens so I keep non-call activity in the PWA version to avoid this nonsense.
I’m sure they will add tabs eventually as an afterthought and make it even more obtuse though.
I also reflexively delete the personal OneNotes and start a new one where I want it to be, but the war between me and Microsoft about how I want my personal documents stored has now raged for many many years.
Subscriptions like these have always been a scam.
Fun story, it’s called office 365 as when you see the price you’ll turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Ok that doesn’t really work but God I love that stupid joke.
Anyway I haven’t used office personally for ages and never seem to run into real compatibility issues with the meager personal/business overlap in my situation.
It made me chuckle a little imaging that you do a full 365 degree spin Infront of Microsoft and then walk away (in an awkward way), instead of 180 degrees to walk the opposite direction haha
Technically speaking with 365* of rotation if you are far enough away you will be able to walk past microsoft, so this is possible.
365 spin, then realizing your mistake and awkwardly walking backwards out of the room
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The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I’m sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.
As for businesses that part stinks… once you get integrated with all the services offered, it’s going to take a lot to back out since it’s not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It’s awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn’t anticipate this then they didn’t do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that’s updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
It is. Remember when they just made a new version every 3 years and you didn’t REALLY need to buy the latest one if you had the previous one?
Well that didn’t make them enough money.
They still do that, though.
Yes, but you have to know that they do. They only advertise 365 on their website.
They need money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
This decade for SURE! We promise!
the technical breakthrough of increasing shareholder value
Excel has most businesses in a headlock. Can’t see why anyone else pays for M$. I have Office, but it’s a permanent license from my last job. When I upgrade, say bye bye.
Exactly, the only reason I have the subscription is for Excel and OneDrive. My NAS and home network is still not good enough to cover the backup needs of my whole family.
