Refund requests flood Microsoft after tricking users into AI upgrades

https://www.afr.com/technology/microsoft-offers-refunds-after-tricking-customers-into-ai-upgrades-20251105-p5n81k

67•speckx•3mo ago

Comments

BewareTheYiga•3mo ago

http://archive.today/BRCuY

Was this just a dark pattern or did they flat out hide the classic option?

jacquesm•3mo ago

Both?

dpoloncsak•3mo ago

"Microsoft admitted on Thursday that it was only when users tried to cancel their subscriptions that they were told they could revert to a lower-cost option."

Isn't this textbook dark pattern?

skywhopper•3mo ago

I remember when this came up and you had to go the “cancel” route to get back to the normal pricing. Tip to product folks: if you have to hide the cheap option to get people to choose plan with more features, you’ve failed at your jobs. Choosing this path is lazy, cynical, unethical, and in a just world, criminal.

exsomet•3mo ago

They wouldn’t do this stuff unless it worked at large scale.

The irony is, at least in my case, I made the impulse decision to just cancel outright instead of accepting the lower price, which lost them what had been a 15 year recurring customer. I’m one person, but I wonder how many others did the same.

qubex•3mo ago

I’m furious that there’s apparently no way to even downgrade if you’re an iOS/iPadOS Office 365 subscriber as I am. Co-pilot isn’t only useless, it’s an actively hostile encumbrance I’d pay good money to rid myself of.

anshumankmr•3mo ago

>it’s an actively hostile encumbrance I’d pay good money to rid myself of.

sorry... I know it has its problems but makes it hostile? (My knowledge of Microsoft CoPilot begins and ends with its chat thing)

Eddy_Viscosity2•3mo ago

It's not that copilot is hostile, its that microsoft is hostile by constantly and tenaciously shoving it your face at every interaction. Its the default load app, it has copilot buttons and widgets sprinkled everywhere you look. You have to click away pushes to use it. Just take this thing away and leave me to get my work done please.

antonyh•3mo ago

I 'cancelled' down to a non-AI family sub, but ended up full cancelling before the kick-in date for the annual renewal. I'm done with the nonsense and dark patterns. The shenanigans has worn thin.

I'm tired of the price hikes for AI - if it was good enough without AI, it's should be optional and a separate sub. It's an enhancement not a core feature.

qwertyuiop_•3mo ago

But AI is not a bubble.

ZeroConcerns•3mo ago

Yeah, well, that seems entirely unsurprising. Despite nominally being "on the Microsoft platform", I don't see many results from their "AI strategy", and what I do see is entirely underwhelming:

-The Copilot key on all my recent laptops literally does nothing, other than pop up a preferences dialog that allows me to choose between 'None', 'Search' (which just redirects to a Bing-Webview-from-hell) and 'Custom' (which just informs me that I have no suitable providers installed). So, yeah, 'None' it is!

-The Copilot button dropdown on my MacOS 'New Outlook' (the only platform on which that is slightly usable) displays an empty menu. Asking web-based Copilot about that, its response is "yeah, well, that is quite a tease, isn't it"... Uhhhm, sure?

-Copilot code completions in Visual Studio only ensure a quick trip to disable them. I mean, maybe 5% of the time they're topical, but the remaining 95% is just cases of it trying to insert 20+ lines whenever I make a simple typo. I mean, really?

But, yeah, I guess we're stuck with this kind of nonsense for the foreseeable future, until it starts to hurt. But, that might be a while...

Molitor5901•3mo ago

I loathe copilot and have reverted to using an old version of Outlook desktop, which I then had to regedit to remove copilot buttons etc. It's a horrible product being shoved down our throats.

k310•3mo ago

May I recommend Libre Office? [0] For casual/home use, it should meet needs. Free, no subscription. Spreadsheet can collaborate. [1]

Collabra Office seems to be the port of LibreOffice to ios. (free) Look it up on the app store.

> Collabora Office is a text editor, spreadsheet and presentation program based on LibreOffice, the world's most popular Open Source office suite - and now it's on iOS, enhancing your possibilities to work on mobile devices.

Collaborative versions, a.k.a. Collabra online are available, but hosting is never free.

But TBH, I am your "more casual than casual" office suite user and the bundled Apple apps do my minimal office tasks, and are compatible with MS formats.

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/

[1] https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...

[2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/

nticompass•3mo ago

> Microsoft said in a statement it regretted the way it handled the situation.

Is there _actual_ regret here, or is it more of a "sorry we got caught" type of thing?

karmakurtisaani•3mo ago

It's always the latter.

tech234a•3mo ago

I can confirm that Microsoft used a similar tactic in the US. I was only aware of it because I had seen some news articles at the beginning of the year, I doubt most people who don’t read tech news would have been aware of this.

apple4ever•3mo ago

Same. I was thankful I could downgrade.

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