No, I don't think so. I either sail the high seas or subscribe for a month or two when job searching then toss it when I'm done.

For an org where individual users aren't technical I'd never try to get by w/o Microsoft Office. The assumption by all large orgs. that you're going to use Microsoft Office is pervasive. Even if the Free Office suites work fine tech support is always going to be mired down in compatibility issues, both real and perceived.

Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.

My company pays for office though, and I end up having to use it to play their Sensitivy Rules games for labeling files.

Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?

PowerPoint is underrated.

For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.

Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.

For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.

But nothing beats excel or power point.

Likely they'd charge more for it.

Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.

> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want

Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.

The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.

If you replace office, you'll have to replace sharepoint, onedrive, etc.. and it isn't just the tools but the policies and critical features that go along with those. For most orgs, this is literally their lifeblood, not just some tool they can yank out. For smaller orgs it might be easier, but those don't pay Microsoft as much anyways.

From a user point of view, there are tools that have similar features, some even better features. G-suite is the only platform i know of that unifies all the office productivity products like 365 does. But neither G-suite nor any other platform can be managed/policed as well as 365. At the end of the day, will Google behave any better than Microsoft anyways (cost or otherwise)? And it isn't just policing and management but securing all that precious data in there, Microsoft might not be great but lots of tech-debt has gone into securing it within that platform. A migration would be costly, justifying it with cost savings alone might be difficult.

Except there are not really any competitors if you look at the whole package.

A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange.

The fact you get the big-four (Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint) thrown in is really just icing on the cake.

Which kind of is on Microsoft for not fixing the situation and just carrying cruft every release. They could have a separate tool to fix/migrate to whatever modern format they are using nowadays (or to some "light" format that doesn't allow all the features 99% of users don't care about).

Their subscription could be much cheaper.

It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.

If you have absolutely nothing in your documents that you wouldn’t mind giving the FBI to read without a warrant or probable cause, it is possible you are wasting your one and only life.

A good example would be anyone in the state-legal cannabis industry. This is still a federal crime (Schedule 1!), and giving cloud providers (and thus DHS without a warrant thanks to FAA702) concrete detailed evidence of same is, from a criminal liability standpoint, the same thing as mailing the FBI photos of your meth lab with your return address on it.

Then why don't they? I think it's precisely because they don't want anyone "investing significant resources into competing products"

There's a line for everyone and current prices obviously aren't too much for a majority of people, including me. I just don't stay subscribed when I'm not using it.

In any sector where the barriers to entry are destroyed you either have to go really big or go home.

It's very odd that they propose PowerPoint as the Publisher replacement. How do you create a fold out leaflet in PowerPoint!? Maybe most of the people left using Publisher actually only need PowerPoint's features, rather than the full power of Word?

Of the last two times I had to make a flyer, one of the two I pulled up PowerPoint to accomplish. It's not a completely outlandish direction. They should add a Publisher mode that transforms the interface for print document design.

There are loads of competitors in the space. Google Docs, LibeOffice, OnlyOffice, WPS Office, and I'm sure there are many others in the space that are lesser known. All of these are compatible with Office formats.

India's central government didn't adopt Zoho just to insulate against Microsoft. It was done when Trump imposed a 50% tariff on imports from India. It was targeted against US IT companies in general, though the most mentioned one was Google. Zoho is an Indian company.

I had switched to Zoho about 6 months before them and it has provided a rather decent experience so far. The biggest attractions for me though, are that it's very economical and it has transactions in local currency using local payment systems. They also have a good selection of apps.

Honestly, this was a wasted opportunity for GoI. Indian domestic IT market is an untapped gold mine that they didn't promote much until recently. But better late than never, I guess.

Another relevant point here is that India is one of the countries that voted against Microsoft OOXML document format in favor of ODF at ISO. There are several central and state level government agencies that adopted ODF officially.

2026 is definitely a great time for still not considering free software since lessons have not been learned yet.