cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48806122
A license verification certificate expires and when it expires, Microsoft Office for Mac assumes it’s unlicensed even if it has been fully paid for.
So, any idiot who paid for Office 2019 for Mac “perpetual” will lose access to it next month.
The same will happen with Office 2021 and Office 2024 in the future.
Pirates are unaffected, only who paid for the product gets punished
Good job 👍🏻
Rossman posted a video a while ago about how Microsoft updated their site without noting they updated it to gaslight their customers into thinking it’s always said that.
There’s a reason these companies are trying to kill the archive sites, it lets people call them on their bullshit.
Edit: YouTube source
This is pretty wild to see. Based on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office
Some people could have purchased this as late as early October 2021.
If companies are going to literally steal things from the user, then why would I buy anything from them in the future?
This is a clear sign to everyone to not buy anything from Microsoft moving forward, because they clearly think they can just take it back at any time.
Not sure why they’re idiots, trying to go the non-sub option is smart, doesn’t vote for subs. Microsoft is the asshole here.
Not sure why OP is sitting here tanking these hits, but I don’t think OP meant to call people who bought perpetual licenses to Office idiots. I think they’re saying that Microsoft thinks they’re idiots. Still, OP should have clarified that or at least answered at least one person who asked.
Because it’s a repost.
If you go to the original, OP actually has the top comment explaining exactly that: “idiots” refers to MS treating their customers as such, not a judgement by OP.
Somewhat loaded headline
I hate how people getting scammed by near monopolistic monoliths casually being fraudulent in their advertisements is them being “idiots” rather than just victims who haven’t spent their whole life navigating the myriad ways billionaires are researching to more elegantly fuck us. Why consumer protection is supposed to be a thing, why anti-trust is supposed to be a thing, and people are trapped between fascists and a “tactical vote” alternative that has done very little to stop the fascists from casually dismantling these protections.
Good job media for always individualizing the problem and blaming the victims.
It’s an appeal directly to the thriving community of intellectual property pirates here on Lemmy in order to make the post directly to the front page.
Notice that neither of you have refuted the veracity of the headline claim.
It can sometimes be annoying when news communities require posts to use an article’s original headline, but it definitely makes sense at times.
Like this time
You think so? I only see an acurate representation oft reality
Love it.
I’d argue trying to avoid yet another subscription by paying upfront was an honest and good faith strategy. The problem was assuming Microsoft also acts in good faith, and wouldn’t just take the money and run like they have just 7 years in.
Honestly for things like this, I would struggle to be convinced that these folks aren’t entirely within their right to take back what they already bought in good faith by pirating it.
After all, perpetual means you bought a license to use that program for life, regardless of whether Microsoft wants to uphold that or not.
Disabled or pirated are not the only options:
Since the OP specifies Mac users, as a Mac user, I find iWork perfectly serviceable. I think it’s a bit controversial with its “Ribbon” on the right rather than the top, though it kind of makes sense. I don’t love iWork (Writer, Numbers, and Keynote), but they are good and they come with Macs (or at the very least are free in the App Store).
I have tried LibreOffice recently, and I didn’t care for it. But I am glad that such a robust free office suite is available on Windows. I believe some Linux distros ship with it, too. If I didn’t have iWork, I’d probably just use LibreOffice. It’s not terrible, I just have a better choice.
a robust free office suite
The few times I tried using LibreOffice, it’s anything but robust. Very bad UX, and even worse, it frequently crashes and fails to recover, resulting in data loss. And I’ve only been using Linux for more than 10 years now.
The Apple office apps are still free, but they do have an add-on subscription too now.
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.
It’s been quite a while since I used iWork, but iWork is different than office. In some ways it’s a better product - the layout and formatting in Pages is worlds ahead of Word. It’s not a clone of the Office suite, which works to its advantage.
Is iWork compatible with Office files though? That’s going to be the sticking point for people who had been using it and lost access…
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.
^ This. Easy to get, easy to install, works like a charm and the license is “perpetual” you won’t need bother with it ever again.
The last Mac I put this on was determined not to let me change doc files to open with it no matter what I did. It would change it for individual files only, but not the file type. Maybe because it was m1 or something.
Yet another reason to stick with LibreOffice and other FOSS open source software.
ATM machine.
More like ATM Teller Machine
Yet another reason to look for alternatives to Libre.
Victim-blaming is the real stupidity here. Microsoft harasses its customers (again) and now the customers are the idiots?
This is the same type of propaganda Nvidia is trying to push. Jensen Huang saying “people should have planned better, the rising prices of hardware was imminent” is the exact same tactic of being the cause of the problem and still putting the blame of everyone else.
imo it was sarcasm
Well, you’re not wrong, but who the heck buys a “perpetual” license for a Microsoft product unless it’s for a company? And especially why pay for stupid boost water office if you could have libre for free?
If it’s not stupidity then at least ignorance. Doesn’t mean Microsoft is an arse for doing that.
who the heck buys a “perpetual” license for a Microsoft product
Office used to always be a perpetual license, so nearly average person that needed an office suite bought one.
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?
It’s different for the average person, they don’t usually know about alternatives and are fine paying for software from a company like MS.
But isn’t that just the definition of ignorance? I just do something I know nothing about and also don’t care to inform myself beforehand?
Like me going to the garage with my car. They could tell me whatever they want and I have to believe it. That is ignorance I pay with probably spiced up bills of things I never needed.
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.
I work with Excel a lot for work. I’ve been tempted for a few years to buy a perpetual license for my personal machine because using the same software is just easier. I haven’t, and obviously now I won’t be.
But don’t put down paying a reasonable price for a perpetual license for software you use often. It’s thinking like that that’s gotten us all-subscription options.
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 :-)
Idk what reason youd have to buy that and its honestly irrelevant. Just because a company is known for being shit doesnt mean we should just accept it and start calling people stupid when they get fucked over.
“Oh you decided to get treatment from USA Medicality Corp. Inc. and they killed you and your entire family. Damn youre such an idiot theyve been killing families for years!” is a bad take if you ask me. The company should be held liable for their actions.
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 example was mostly a shitpost but it got the point across. And yes, ignorant/stupid people will always exist, en-masse actually. For varying reasons, be it cultural, education, emotional, religious or just pure ignorance, people end up in shit because they have different outlooks, needs and experiences. The reasons seldom matter to me since its usually not the victim that actively tries to end up in the shitter but the perpetrator that actively attempts to exploit them.
Luckily companies arent people, no matter how much US government wants them to be. They should, to the nit-pickiest of levels, be restricted by the law and punished when they break it.
Victim-blaming to me seems inherently ignorant in itself. How does one even come up with the idea of blaming someone whos the victim of the crime? No matter how ignorant or naive they seem. And especially when its from a well-known shit company like Microslop?
since its usually not the victim that actively tries to end up in the shitter but the perpetrator that actively attempts to exploit them.
Fair point. I stand corrected. Guess I wash a bit too harsh in judgement.
Victim-blaming to me seems inherently ignorant in itself. How does one even come up with the idea of blaming someone whos the victim of the crime?
Touché. That was indeed ignorant of me.
I was about to purchase some legitimate licenses for MS products when this was first announced.
saved myself the money and trouble and just pirated it.
mehh I’ve been using Libre office for many years, fuck 'em.
LibreOffice is so good I donate to the community that keeps these projects alive!
I’m not sure I’m cool with calling people ‘idiots’ in this scenario. We don’t blame the victims of con men when they’re stolen from, and this is the same thing, just on a bigger scale.
That said, here is the obligatory linking to LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/
It’s free and a better choice.
We need to quit focusing on stuff like this. If somebody calls you a fucking idiot so fucking what?
And we do blame the victims constantly. The people that blame the victims do nothing but fucking win.
And some of us ARE idiots, no need to throw us under the bus, it’s still wrong to take advantage of stupid people
i read it as sarcasm, i would write it like that, especially if i was one of them
I read it as someone kinda being a dick, but it’s the Internet. Meaning isn’t always well-conveyed electronically. That’s why we have the sarcasm tag.
Had you gone as far as the article you would have seen the disclaimer that makes it clear it’s sarcasm.
I did.
The title of the article is ‘Microsoft is disabling Office 2019 for Mac next month’, which makes it pretty clear that the editorializing of the title here on Lemmy was intended to be a bit dickish, at least to me.
If I am wrong, cool, but it’s not because I didn’t look at the article.
They mean that when it was originally posted on the db0 Lemmy piracy community, there was a disclaimer to say it was sarcasm
Well, maybe they should have clicked through to the article.
/s
And for anyone who says in excel I can create a spreadsheet sheet that does this amazing company defining process, I’ll counter that with you can make a calculator in Minecraft. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Not surprised in the least. It’s all about maintaining incoming cash flow.
They cancelled my Win11 (from purchased Win10 eligible upgrade) key earlier this year when I replaced a failed motherboard.
Happy to be free of their ecosystem. Should have jumped free long ago.
Welcome to the other side. Breathe the free air again
Thanks! Still having some problems with sound popping, but had that under Windows. >.<
Which distro? I had a similar issue
Mint. I’ve gotten the popping/crackling to a minimum, but it’s still happening occasionally. (Oddly it happens most often with games that have sound disabled both by OS and via in game)
It was annoying enough I saved it, I highly recommend starting some sort of docs setup so future you can remember how you fixed things. This fixed it for me, granted I was on pop but both Ubuntu based so same layers underneath.
Audio Crackling
You can fix this by increasing the minimum audio buffer size, which, in turn, will increase the overall audio latency.
It’s not good for real-time professional audio recording, but it won’t hurt the general gaming and multimedia experience unless you use a very high value to the point it leads to a noticeable desync with video. Test with a greater minimum quantum
This takes effect immediately, but it won’t persist across reboots.
This worked for me
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 2048Increasing the minimum quantum permanently
The default is 1024.
cat << EOF > ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/fix-crackle.conf context.properties = { default.clock.min-quantum = 2048 } EOF systemctl --user restart pipewire wireplumberYou can revert this by just deleting the file. Alternative method
This will improve the handling of low-latency audio at the expense of overall higher CPU usage and with that, power usage.
sudo kernelstub -a threadirqs reboot
So far, so good. Thanks much for this!
Of course, welcome to the Linux community!
What lawyerspeak TOS bullshit are they going to cite as a way to avoid refunds and lawsuits?
That’s EOL and they won’t do any additional support. Renew certificates is 1 hours of intern effort and 20 bucks, so fuck you.
*effort and cost made up, but l considering they made billions with office, it’s basically equivalent.
Victim blaming is definitely how you win people to your side… Dumbass
Seem to have worked for this fucking shitty ass president. And his shitty ass fucking party. And I’ll be honest it seems to work for every major corporation.
The victim blaming definitely works, Just ask anybody who was raped.
classic Micro$lop
OOP’s comment on the original post that the cross-poster should have shared:
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”
That’s not how words work
That explanation makes it worse.
