Am I late to the party? Above my Boing, there was a banner ad for some laptop that comes with Office 365 for 1 year. One year? Is it now for rent? And when your lease is done you can just discard all your documents?
Every day I love Open Office more.
Agreed about Open Office!
But I think this just reinforces the idea that IP is becoming a weird concept that is increasingly being treated as the same as real property. You have to wonder if such things are being done out of a (real or perceived) sense of desperation or if it’s being done out of opportunity, because they feel as if most people are on board with anti-piracy ideology?
Office has been running on a subscription instead of purchase model since 2011, I think.
“If we could snatch up ownership of the IP developed through our apps, we would. If we could figure out how to swallow your soul, we would shoot you in the face and eat the corpse. Now, pay the ransom and we’ll allow you to access our files… the files you may think of as your own. Fuck you.”
Both. It depends. I can get a full version of it via work for like $29 if I order an install DVD, $10 for pure digital version and it is 2 licenses and let my wife install it cause Libre/Open/whateveroffice is more than enough for what I do at home for that kind of thing.
Office 365 home is like $100/yr for office, skydrive storage of 1TB/user, outlook.com account, 5 licenses + 5 tablet licenses, skype minutes every month, and proper tech support. So if you have a 2 or 3 kids in school it seems a decent enough deal.
By way of comparison, Open Office gives me unlimited installs forever, but no Skype minutes. It is free.
Oh I got no arguments against free and like I stated it is what I use at home anyway, My wife on the other hand does all kinds of magic that just plain works better in Office proper so I get a cheap version of pro via work.
Just saying that if you actually need office for whatever reason the subscription version is not as horrible as some people make it out to be. It is a pretty nice deal.
That’s why I’m sticking with my office2011. But, at some point very soon I’m going to be forced to rent my everyday workhorse software, and pay Adobe fucking monthly. That’s the one I’m bitter about, because there isn’t an open source alternative to InDesign/Illustrator/Photoshop. Go ahead and say Gimp, but that doesn’t help for my workflow and 10+ years of legacy documents including some old Quark files. Yeah, I’m kind of bitter.
Yeah Adobe on the other hand, that was kinda ouch. The price on that just seems like gouging.
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