Microsoft punishes idiots who purchased a "perpetual" license of Office 2019 for Mac by disabling it next month, pirates unaffected

As if Microsoft was founded just yesterday and wasn’t scamming everyone at everything for like decades, right?

Not saying that I agree with the title, just explaining what I think was the reason.

Although one could say that trusting microslop to keep their word after what we've seen them do in the last years is... foolish to say the least.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me multiple times since the 90s, that's on me.

/s

Non sarcastic take, only MS is to blame.

Certainly will be, this is definitely the last windows I’m running. Cheers.

It was my sons school computer and it’s running education which for win 10 I have been happy with. One son has ditched win 11 and is running Bazzite now. The other is wound back to win 10 I think, but he’ll move

I’m in the process of deciding which distro to move on; I manage my sons NDIS so that’s front and centre; security of federal government records and claims.

It's sarcastic because you obviously aren't an idiot for buying a lifelong license to a product.

If anything most of the time it's supposed to be the right choice (I'm only talking about licenced product, not ownership).

Especially if it's a tool you use regularly.

At no point these people where supposed to "know better and not buy this". Microsoft just did a rugpull.

I wasn't aware of all the bullshit these companies were doing back in 2019, but I recall it wasn't full blown enshittification yet.

For your second ask, it doesn't make it better or lesser, it just adds shock value, engagement baiting.

Weird. Works fine for me. Here's the text:

Disclaimer: I wrote "idiot" to describe someone who paid for the product not because they're actually idiots, but it's because Microsoft is treating them like that: their official solution on the website is "simply subscribe to the latest and greatest or buy a new "perpetual" license to office 2024 to continue using what you paid for"

I get it. You're absolutely right it doesn't make them idiots. Even I'm being hyperbolic to an extent. The real issue is much bigger and doesn't stop at Microsoft. I get why people feel so powerless and end up going along with the status quo. Really, the fact that we've allowed it is more of a reflection on our collective Idiocracy.

Yes... I was able to disable the subscription-oriented tools from Numbers (Excel) but not Pages (Word). Maybe I didn't try hard enough. They're marked so you can just not click on them, but there's a way to hide them. I did it on one, I can probably do it on the others.

They're completely free with a subscription for GenAI stuff that wasn't there before. They didn't take anything away from the free product.

Yes, it opens the files and can work with them. However to save them back to the original filetype, you need to export

As far as I can tell, yes — and so is LibreOffice, since people are talking about that one, too. And I suspect they both have the same limitation — encrypted Office files. So yes, I can read .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files. I can't read Publisher (.pubx) files, but neither can Mac Office users — Microsoft never released Publisher for Mac. I can then write them to the iWork formats. I can also take an iWork document and export to Office. I suspect Office can import iWork files. Office interoperability is mostly a solved problem, though I think there are a few outlier cases.

Doesn't change my point. Why pay for it? Either just use it for free or get libreoffice. If I pay a thing from a corpo like MS, behavior like that is totally to be expected. Why even be surprised?

I never paid for a single Microsoft product.

I get your point but why is ignorance to be accepted but corpo behavior isn't? I mean sure, fuck MS for that, but who is really surprised by a US-company enshittifying their already bad crap? Can only be people who don't really know what they're doing there. Which is ignorance.

Your example kinda lacks in the regard that everyone needs insurance but noone needs Microsoft office. Otherwise same point (assuming there'd be a good free healthcare alternative): if you died because you're ignorant to the things that matter in this world, and you refused to educate or inform yourself beforehand... Well?

If I leave my front door wide open, I can't be surprised when someone comes in and robs me blind. Just because I don't know burglaries exist.

The sheer idiocy of this take. Libre Office (or other open source alternatives) haven’t been around forever, and paying for software you use isn’t exactly an outlandish idea.

Just ignoring your ad-hominem... Libre's around for 15 years. Ok, if you're forced to use that shit due to work, you have not much choice. Except another job :) As I haven't worked for the last 3 decades, I don't know how much of that shitty MS still goes around. Paying, of course. But not for microsoft or most of the other US-corpos that destroy everything they touch. And even if i would be forced to pay, there are tons of grey-market OEM-keys. Get Office for some cents. If that goes extinct, buy current version for some cents. You're legit (MS doesn't care anyway, and never has) and cheap. Also if you're long enough in the market to say Libre's not been around forever, you also know that MS regularly kills products no matter how "perpetual" your license was.

It’s thinking like that that’s gotten us all-subscription options.

Nope. It is, has been, and will be just ignorance. People who don't know better and/or don't WANT to know better and/or simply don't care at all. The sum of my subscription-costs comes down to vpn, usenet-indexer and usenet and the rest are monthly donations to several FOSS-projects. It's either lifetime-deals (expecting them to end way before MY lifetime ends) or no deals. Lifetime-deals are always a gamble though.

If people willingly pay for netflix, spotify or leased cars...well, you will own nothing, rent everything and be happy. There's a reason they can regularly raise prices and still not loose a significant portion of customers. I probably spent six-figures on steam and bandcamp/other-music-sources. Not one cent on spotify&co. And if i couldn't afford to buy, I'd pirate it. But surely would not RENT stuff.

And there has been numerous studies over the last decades as to how piracy does NOT affect sales in any noteworthy amount.

So, how is my fuck-us-bigtech-or-pirate-stance the culprit for all-subscription-options? I'm the minority :-)

Had you gone as far as the article you would have seen the disclaimer that makes it clear it's sarcasm.

Which distro? I had a similar issue

I also plunder this mans booty 😏

This isn't that some architecture isn't supported or there's some new unseen dependency that failed, it's a cert expiry. Something that happens millions of times per day and can be completely automated.

Do you know how certificates work? I do. I run a cryptography forum. Expiration is the simplest of the mechanisms in certificates (it's just a date stamp and time limit rule) and it's 100% perfectly predictable what it will do.