Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices

To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.

> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive.

I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

I suspect my country is the same. I expect most countries are the same.

Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?

IT departments often lack the skills and/or desire to use anything but MS

There was a time in the 90s when quite a number of governments were aware of this Microsoft problem and insisted on open formats, so that important govt records and data could be open down the track. It seems like all of that was forgotten and traded for 'convenience'.

"it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible."

.. until it doesn't.

There is a very good reason why switching away from M365 is almost impossible.

There is a very good reason why Microsoft offers free consultancy for a while if you just keep using M365.

Microsoft has made the world dependent on them. They are one of the biggest corporations that use drug lord tactics to keep its users.

The European Union sees it and is trying to fight it with all its might. Which is very very difficult when you're fighting a company that has more power than certain governments. It's like fighting the drug lord while still purchasing opiods from him.

Europe is doing a pretty good job on slowly veering off this addiction. Might be worth reaching out to them for knowledge sharing or two

It's funny reading the child comments completely glossing over your comment and just suggesting using Zoho or Google Docs lol

Vendor lock-in has always been the product.

This is why I’m surprised by headlines like this”nobody wants to by Microsoft’s AI” like, every corporate M365 user must be either considering it or already started the purchasing process.

Same in Australia

OK, supposed Claude in X many years could write a drop in replacement for every single one of those things. Would you raise your rates in the meantime too?

The worst part about MS Office isn't the direct user experience, because I can usually choose to use other software. The worst part is that I and everybody else are subjected to the documents that Office produces. Their defaults and their UX inevitably produce stuff that is hard to read and inconsistent, unless you fight the software really hard and make sacrifices with your desired output. And there's no escape from it. Another specimen of Word's 2.5 cm margins, 200-character lines in poorly designed knockoff Helvetica will probably find its way to my mailbox before the end of the day.

The reality is DTP outside of pro sectors (i.e. these days InDesign) was rendered worthless by how ubiquitous the tooling was.

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

I used Publisher (2.0! and then 95) quite a bit in the mid to late 1990s. I haven't used it since then because Word now has all the features that were previously exclusive to Publisher, so its purpose has evaporated. It's certainly true that Word has bugs and frustrations but I'd be surprised if Publisher didn't too.

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?

I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".

Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.

What's crazier is that it actually stops working if installed.

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.

>My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed

For most it didn't. The non 365 Office came in 3 tiers Student, business, and enterprise. Publisher only came with enterprise.

I last used Publisher way back in the late nineties to lay out the school newsletter, later I graduated to PageMaker because I found Publisher easy to use but ultimately quite limiting. Fun memories, I hadn’t even realised Publisher still existed, and I’m the most elder of elder millennials.

> Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint,

"Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?" "I believe he did."

> They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026.

You have my sympathy. I was also a frequent MS Publisher user, and I always felt that not many people knew about it. It's a useful, simple DTP package suitable for many less complex page layout scenarios. After the End-of-Support announcement, I switched to the LibreOffice Draw already. Fortunately, LibreOffice Draw works quite nicely as a Publisher replacement for me. There is also Scribus [1].

[1]: https://www.scribus.net/

Powerpoint for DTP... did the person writing that know what Publisher even is ?

> My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed or was included in M365

For a very long time Publisher was marketed to home users who want to do some simple DTP work, and not to businesses. This is a very different audience than businesses.

Not to worry. Once they unleash those AI enhanced vibe programmers that are doing %33 more programming on this problem all will be good. The AI is already helping them to become more profitable by making it necessary to charge more for their product. The sky's the limit. Or Skynet's the limit;)

Weird that with as much as they're pushing Co-Pilot everywhere, they for some reason can't use it to maintain Publisher. Maybe Co-Pilot isn't as good as Microsoft claims.

InDesign also includes Pantone and is the logical go to for anyone who truly cares about modern DTP

Sunsetting a product to save money smells like promo-driven culture

Install LibreOffice.

This one caught me by surprise. Publisher is a really great tool to create internal documents…reminds me of the Adobe Fireworks fiasco. They force you to use a tool of which you only need 5% and pay an increase cost (time and subscription) 500%.

I mean, Powerpoint, really? That app should’ve been gone a long time.

I was thinking the same thing about people seemingly not knowing about Publisher.

And I always found those memes about photos moving around your text annoying, because that it literally what you want when making a document (you know, what Word is designed for) (but you can just change the behaviour if you want a different layout anyway).

Except Publisher was never good compared to the competition.

Pretty sure Gemini could create a Slides doc from a PDF of a Publisher file.

They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year.

Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.

> Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98.

This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.

There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.

And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.

None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.

People no longer really look at a product and ask if it does what they need, they just compare it to the previous product and ask if the newer product has 'more.' More is ALWAYS better, and there's no reason to think past this stage.

In this way, any successful product has no path to avoid becoming bloated. Cars must become heavier and more expensive over time. Video games must become longer, and features and systems must proliferate. And of course software can never be feature complete.

Everything must be 'more' every year no matter how much the actual experience is degraded.

The only main feature post 98 is that the file format is zipped xml documents. Before that it was proprietary binaries.

I came to say something similar. Office 2000 seems more than sufficient for everybody outside of some very specific niches. The success of the comparatively much more basic Google Docs and Sheets are proof of this.

Similarly I could live happily ever after with Photoshop 7.x or CS1 if they took full advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.

SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.

Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.

Track changes and collaborative editing are both pretty important features IMO

The only feature they added is you can't open other Word files so you need a new version.

O365 lock-in is all about Outlook.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint are just hangers on to help spread the Outlook virus.

Is there a reason to use this over LibreOffice? I had until this year a pretty old machine (~11-12 years old at time of replacement, upper midrange at time of purchase) and I never felt like it was slow -- possibly because everything was slow on that machine though and I was stuck in a forest...

XLOOKUP is so nice though. The other stuff I can live without, especially the UI on data connections changing all the time and the connections breaking anyway.

Word 97 was basically feature complete though (if buggy - the same bugs persist today of course), including track changes and compare/merge documents. The killer feature now is being able to work on the same document with multiple people and seeing their changes in realtime. You used to be able to do this on-prem but that product (Office Online Server) got killed. I wonder why.

Office 2003 supports OOXML rather than the proprietary binary blobs that are office 97 formats.

Honestly not sure I've ever used any of the new Office features past maybe Office 2000

Business basic goes from $6 to $7. Business premium is unchanged from $22 to $22.

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.

> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever.

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.

     - Its one package
     - All the non-tech users already know Microsoft
     - Most IT techies will be VERY familiar with Microsoft
     - If you are migrating from on-Prem then it is highly likely you've got Exchange on-prem.

The great unwashed masses will still continue to pay it. It's not a sizeable increases that they'd be willing to move elsewhere. People rationalize it in the context of it's only a buck a month and other things increase by more. M$ are not stupid but do know what they're doing. May take is. Don't do drugs. Don't do subscriptions. Don't do MICROS~1.

In my experience, most people, especially execs who are negotiating the licensing deals, want Copilot. Even if they are underwhelmed after using it, at that point, MS doesn't care. They already have your money.

>How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

I wish I could agree with this, but the ecosystem lock-in is too great. They might lose business for sure but it may not put a dent in their revenue at all.

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.

> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing.

There are different types of danger in playing the "We are the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love.

There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations.

But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build their life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country.

But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment.

But where will the next generation be shifted to?

Launched to Europe after Canada? Then launched into Space?

It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job.

That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.

It sucks. I really do love the work Microsoft has done in the past decade with LSP and developer experience.

Most of their enterprise clients get bundled services so it often still retains its competitive edge. Their Power suite, Teams and the existing integrations make it cost effective even with the increases.

Other than Google, what are other competitors that worth evaluating?

Can I just get the version without CoPilot for cheaper? Or at all?

Likely they'd charge more for it.

If you think there are competitors, you are clearly mistaken of what exactly O365 is.

Nobody offers what Microsoft bundles here. From editors, to storage, to communication to identity to management.

And I say this as someone who hates dealing with Microsoft and their products.

Google was increasing their pricing too. Also before last year they were charging an extra license for Gemini but then decided to throw it in.

I'd disagree in terms of the cloud capabilities. When it is used properly. The cloud stuff is very useful. I currently have a document that is going through multiple versions with about 8 people, with different expertise collaborating. Some have edit privs, some only have review. The ability for everyone to work on it simultaneously, with version history and no more document-v12-copy3_FINAL_FINALv2 is most welcome.

I think a surprising number of companies only survive because Microsoft Office gets around hostile internal IT departments and gives workers capabilities they can’t otherwise get on their locked down workstations.

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.

I listened to the acquired podcast where they interviewed Steve Ballmer for a few hours. Very nice to get that perspective.

But he commented quite a bit on how office licensing changed and how that made MS filthy rich. Around Office 97 was when they started emphasizing getting the full office suite as a licensing option. Especially for companies this was a big deal because you would just get all the office applications; whether you needed them or not.

And then later around 2011 they figured out that companies really didn't like having to deal with having to buy a lot of office licenses every few years. So it became a yearly subscription instead and at that point the revenue increased again, a lot.

It's the progressive insight that transitioned MS from being windows OEM license dependent (office came with the PC) to being more dependent on recurring SAAS revenue. Companies actually prefer this model. Even though it costs them more.

I've been free from any MS licenses since I started working for startups on a mac. I occasionally use Google docs and gmail. But I haven't really done anything with Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint etc. since 2012. You don't need any of that stuff to run a company. The rare case I deal with a customer that insists on that stuff, they can just give me access to the web version. Or send a PDF. Or one an office file that usually opens fine in drive.

Bullshit. Just from a document editing perspective, going back to a network share where only one person can edit a doc is not going to fly. I used to have to deal with this as IT/desktop support and it fucking sucked. Docs in the cloud give you better collab capabilities and remove the need to have fancy networking, VPNs, international security exclusion groups etc, domain controller bullshit, connecting all of the companies offices together. Connect to the Internet, and all your stuff is there no matter where you are. It sounds like you've never had to support the infra for office workers before. This is way better than it used to be. For a small company, sure, do whatever. But the bigger it gets, the harder all that shit becomes and requires a lot of work to keep it running.

> If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted.

But what about the impact of increased productivity when not having to deal with the garbage that are New Teams and New Outlook? The employees would start doing more in lesser time and the companies could potentially make more profits too. Why would they want that if they could just be locked in with Microsoft month-on-month? /s

They’d get owned by security vulnerabilities in the first hour, fwiw.

Should be the standard for modern governments.

Calligra (KDE Office Suite) is also pretty interesting but currently Linux-only https://calligra.org/

Wow, I hadn’t heard about this before. I like that it’s FOSS with AGPL 3. The OnlyOffice screenshots of the spreadsheet application look beautiful (compared to the ugly LibreOffice Calc ones). It says that it works with ODS files (which LibreOffice Calc uses).

Any gotchas to be aware of with OnlyOffice?

here is a (somewhat biased) comparison between OnlyOffice and Collabora Online

https://www.collaboraonline.com/comparing-collabora-with-onl...

Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

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.

For an individual, probably not. I've been an OpenOffice and LibreOffice use for my personal use and contracting business since 2004. I've had no need for "real" Microsoft Office in that time. I also don't deal in macro-encrusted documents or with more esoteric features.

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.

Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?

Power Query + Power Pivot + M. I don't use formulas in cells. The sheets are just a canvas for Pivot Tables, final tables, and charts connected to the data from Power Query and Pivot.

I deal with hundreds of API integrations involving various JSON, CSV, TSV, and XML files with mixed validity. My workflow: Notepad++ for a visual check -> Prototype everything in Excel. I give users a "visual", connect it to real data, and only then migrate the final logic to BI dashboards or databases.

Nothing else delivers results this fast. SQL, BI tools, and Python are too slow because they generally need "clean" data. Cleaning and validation take too much time there. In Excel, it's mostly just a few clicks.

PS: I spent 2 years (2022-2023) using LibreOffice Calc. I didn't touch Excel once, thinking I needed to break the habit. In the end, I did break the habit, but it was replaced by a pile of scripts and utilities because Calc couldn't do what I needed (or do it fast enough). The experience reminds me of testing Krita for 2 years (2018-2020) — I eventually returned to Adobe Photoshop (but that's another story).

PS2: About (Query + Pivot + BI). This allows you to process millions of rows (bypassing grid limitations). It also allows you to compress everything into an OLAP cube, taking up little space and working quickly with data.

Excel has amazing super powers.

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.

As a home user and a Mac user, I haven't needed Office in well over 15 years given iWork and Google Docs.

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

I'd still consider Excel best in class

Sharepoint and office is the modern version of cancer. Nobody wants to manage onprem AD and mapped drives because cLoUd is the solution. Doesn't help that Microsoft stopped caring about onprem.

Excel has no competition whatsoever in the local software space. Google Sheets is somewhat useful for 80% of users but for people who must be on-prem/local it’s Excel or nothing.

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?

"is there any reason to use Office other than <literally every profession using it>?"

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.

I just open them in Google Docs/Slides and then export later to the original format after edits. I’m sure it’s not feature complete but it’s good enough!

I agree that Word has a million replacements. Hell, I usually just roll with a markdown file.

But nothing beats excel or power point.

In practice, it's like how having Adobe Reader used to be. You mostly don't need it, but occasionally you need it for interoperability with other people, such as lawyers.

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.

Seriously. I don't understand why this is even news or posted here.

If they were doubling prices or something then of course, raise the alarms. This is not that.

> At this point Microsoft office suite is practically a monopoly.

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.

It's more a ton of inertia than some sort of monopoly. A lot of new companies immediately start on an alternative these days. They don't see a reason to pay the higher price.

I agree that it's a lot of work to build something that can render and edit their complex format, but quite a few companies have managed now.

At this point?

I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files.

Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite well. Sure, Microsoft has a little bit of a leg up, but it's nothing like the monopoly they had on .doc.

Today, we expect programs to be able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. In the 90s, we truly didn't. Yes, there might be some advanced things that don't always work, but it's so different today.

> Note: Indian Government recently adopted Zoho office suite to insulate themselves from Microsoft.

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.

My OneDrive went from 70 to 100 USD. That is a huge increase.

Yeah, sure, why not repeat the multi-decade old mistakes and decide to go from being dependent and locked in on one piece of proprietary software to being dependent and locked in on another piece of proprietary software.

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

You are trashing a competitor despite having the exact same fundamental flaws.

Please be actually better, please don't lock your users in. It's still time to make the right decision.

Speaking of online use please see: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-online/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs

I don't think it needs one specific alternative; if the protocols they shared were all open and useable, small pieces could be replaced slowly over time.

> They can set whatever price they want

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.

LibreOffice is good enough for many use cases. A competing product doesn't have to be a 100% match feature for feature to be Good Enough for most users.

Shouldn't CoPilot make the thing cheaper? Less need for skilled developers, faster development cycles?

Microsoft increasing prices on a subscription product is an admission that their AI play is failing. The project sucks up money and yields none of the promised returns. Failure to deliver on development, failure to optimize datacenters, failure to reduce required staff in general.

In that case, a lot of software is going to raise their subscription prices. I don't think any AI provider is making profits with these integrations.

I have already ditched Office a decade ago in favour of Google Docs. It was not a dogmatic decision, I just did not see the value.

I'd be surprised if many normal people pay for this. It's for businesses, who aren't going to pay for sketchy keys. Also businesses generally want the web-based collaboration features. The days of emailing round files are long gone.

I use the personal subscription for the onedrive storage for my phones fotos

They saw what the Xbox division is doing and said give me some of that.

Weird view on how capitalism works. They raise prices because they (believe they) can and that's all. Prices are not tied to business cost. Even if all datacenters were subsidized by the government, this price rising would still happen.

Microsoft is basically a B2B now. Their customers are those who use Team and Exchange. Those customers are locked in and with no real alternative to migrate to.

Way more convenient for the FAA702 users, too.

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.

NextCloud?

LibreOffice is working great and is compatible. I have never had any issues with formulas. I suppose if there are some very complex macros or formulas then it will break, but then you are probably using the wrong tool anyway.

> most use it for compatibility sake

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 goes beyond the file formats. There is an entire ecosystem of industry specific extensions and plugins that are heavily used in law and accounting firms. These only work with MS office and they are critical to how many businesses operate.

Wow now where did this come from??? Never heard of it :)

Nope.

Microsoft was successfully sued by the EU for creating vendor lockin with their proprietary file formats. It is for this reason that the "X" formats (docx, pptx, etc.) are "open" and thoroughly "documented", e.g.:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...

However, the formats are incredibly complicated, because they evolved from earlier formats that represented nearly the entire in-memory state of the editing software. To a first order of approximation, the .doc format _was_ Microsoft Word.

Source: I worked at Microsoft during this time period and helped document the XLSX format.

DOCX is a terrible format though. If you don't need to edit a document, PDF is more reliable.

If you do need to edit, DOCX will invariably fudge up headings, numbering, ToCs, alignment of images/figures, keep-together not working properly for captions or tables, etc.

I think for the second usecase someone ought to introduce a completely new format that handles this a lot better. Or maybe the format is already there and it's ePub?

But then what's needed is an editor (on-prem server and local portable executable) that has the nice things like automatic ToC generation, foot/endnotes, track changes/document comparison, online collaboration.

You don't? The price increases are below euro inflation (although the numbers are listed in USD so I'm unsure if the price will be meaningfully different in Europe