Summarizing video showing MS’ horrible practicies regarding Office 365’s subscription tiers, where they basically forcefully upgrade you to a higher tier subscription, and at the same time renaming the tier names so you won’t notice…
Individual users can make use of free alternatives pretty easily, but I’m not sure they’re actually the target for the price increase here.
Schools, governments, businesses, and other institutions pay wild amounts to MS every year.
They’re speed running their product enshitification.
Video summary by Ollama AI:
The video discusses several shady practices employed by Microsoft, including:
- Forced upselling: Microsoft changed the plan and pricing of a user’s Office 365 subscription without their consent, effectively forcing them to pay more for features they didn’t want.
- Renaming and hiding plans: Microsoft renamed an existing plan (e.g., “Personal” to “Classic”) and made it less visible in the user interface, while introducing a new plan with similar features at a higher price point.
- Hallucination problem: The AI-powered feature “co-pilot” generated fabricated information, which is a known issue in generative AI.
- Overpromising free benefits: Microsoft sales representatives touted “free AI credits” as a benefit of the more expensive plan, but these credits were not actually free and had limited value.
- Misleading users about pricing changes: The price hike was effectively hidden by renaming and rebranding existing plans, making it unclear whether the user’s subscription had actually changed in price.
The video suggests that Microsoft engaged in these practices to push customers into using features they might not want or need, rather than providing transparent and honest information about their plans and pricing.
Is this using ollama on the console?
I’ve been missing out on great ai use cases if I can just ask it to summarize a YouTube link.
No. I used Open WebUI.
https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
It’s a UI for ollama. You can share links and ask it questions about the link provided or upload a document such as user manuals to get answers from such documents.
It’s a great tool that utilize Ollama to its full potential.
I know people mentioned the free alternatives, but if the subscription is really just for office, then why not buy a license to a non web based office version? They do still make them, as much as they want to remove them completely. You can even get them heavily discounted off 3rd party sites. I got my copy of 2019 for like $20 a year before it went EOL and I’m still using it because I really don’t have the highest use for it. If you want office 2021, which is good with support until end of 2026, it’s about $50 right now but I see them go lower all the time and can probably get it for $30. This is the pro version as well. Sadly I don’t see office 2024 for sale yet on my site but I guarantee it will be a year from now.
Could you name the site for people who could really use this?
I got my Windows 11 key and office key from here:
https://shop.lifehacker.com/sales/microsoft-office-professional-2021-for-windows-lifetime-license-5
There may be better places but the prices were better than I expected so I tried it. Site was fine, and both licenses worked perfectly. I think i saw get another 15% offer if your a new user so don’t forget to sign up at the bottom to get more off your first purchase. I actually see office 2024 as well now and it’s a bit much at $160, but from what I see Amazon and newegg are selling it for $250. I would still wait, I honestly have no idea what new stuff they ever add that is useful to me anymore, 2021 is probably fine for $100 less.
I was using office 2007 still on windows 10 before I switched to Linux. Old versions are really cheap.
Canceling to downgrade your 365 subscription is the “normal” Microsoft way, so that part is not a new scummy practice that was invented for this scummy occasion. I do hope this forced upsell comes back to bite Microsoft in the ass, most consumers won’t be aware of the downgrade option, but consumer agencies shouldn’t let this slide, it’s setting a very bad precedent.
The ms instructions:
- Go to Services & subscriptions and if prompted, sign in with the Microsoft account associated with your subscription.
- Find your current subscription and select Manage > Cancel subscription.
- The Cancel page will show you the features of your current subscription plan. If you’re switching to another plan with less features, select the plan that works for you.
- Follow the instructions to complete the switch. Your existing subscription might not change immediately, but it will automatically change to the new plan when the plan renews. You won’t be charged for the new plan until it renews into that plan.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/switch-between-microsoft-365-subscriptions-3fcc1efc-2722-427f-8efa-db94b9b0a36b
shoutout to massgrave.dev