Office and Microsoft 365 will soon cost more, and it's all Copilot AI's fault

[Windows Central]

Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family will soon cost more in several regions. The price increase is due to the addition of AI features in Copilot and Designer.

Office and Microsoft 365 will soon cost more, and it's all Copilot AI's fault : Read more

 

[ad47uk]

A Microsoft 365 Classic option will be available, according to ZDNet, and it will cost a similar price to what you pay right now for Microsoft 365.

Similar price? so the price will still increase, if all the features is needed , then it is a good deal, but with free office suites out there that will suit the majority of people, paying for Microsoft 365 is costly over the year.

If I needed Office, I would buy it outright, fed up with subscriptions needed for this and needed for that.
Using a Mac for most things these days, i find pages and numbers does everything i need, but then I am just a home user, if i did not have a Mac, I would be using LibreOffice.

The one they don't have is desktop publishing, but then MS Office don't have that these days. I use Affinity publisher, but there are a couple of free ones around

 

[Ron-F]

The problem with service's subscriptions is that you became dependent of the service provider. As such, I always recommend researching potential alternatives. Microsoft's Office 365 and GamePass currently provide excellent value for money, but I remain ready to switch providers if their terms or pricing become less favorable.

 

[Laura Knotek]

I really don't have any use for the bundled Microsoft 365 these days. 1TB OneDrive storage is all I really need. If that is available standalone at a lower price, then I might drop the full Microsoft 365 subscription.

 

[naddy69]

There is no way I am paying a yearly subscription for Office. I paid around $50 combined for both Office 2021 for Windows and Office 2021 for Mac about 2 years ago.

I also have no need for "AI" anything. That companies "need to show profits from AI soon or it's going to go away" is not my problem.

 

[Lurking_Lurker_Lurks]

I feel like tiers isn't that complex of a concept. Basic, AI, and they could even do one with Copilot Pro. The US isn't being affected (for now), but honestly the $70 I pay per year for one license is already insane compared to when my family used to buy a permanent license of the most recent version on sale in stores.

This AI push is getting increasingly worrisome. They're trying to sell an idea that something is useful and force if on users rather than offer customers something that's actually useful and let them come as they want. Business 101 is you sell solutions not products. AI is doing well as a buzz word, but I don't think they've actually managed to do anywith it that interests or pulls in general users. Everyone's desperate for the next "iPhone moment" and it's true tech has really flatlined. Things aren't improving as much as they used to and if tech companies want to see more growth they do need to find a new use case or concept entirely that resonates with people... I'm just not sure AI is that (or really large scale generative language models). Or at the very least nothing they're doing with it is resonating so far. It kinda is with businesses that want to hire less people (but how much does that increase tech sales when people are out of jobs) and really really sus people wanting indecent pictures of celebrities.

 

[Jack Pipsam]

I've been paying for the Office (yes I will keep calling it Office) sub for pretty much a decade now. I'm very much in the camp of, I hate AI and don't want anything to do with CoPilot. Any option to rip it out of Microsoft programs is something I would desire.

I'm glad they're going to be offering the classic option as I'd swap to that, although it sounds like that's going to increase in price as well, which isn't very good considering that Microsoft should be pretty happy that I actually am paying to use Office and not just installing LibreOffice or something (like I have done on my Ubuntu laptop, and you know what, it's perfectly fine).