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 👍🏻
Idiots?
I’m not one of them, but what makes them idiots? Seems kind of uncalled for.
It just wouldn’t be a lemmy post without a smug sense of superiority.
I suppose you’re right, in certain communities.
Seems like you feel superior to them
That’s what I’m thinking
I bought the win version, because I have a five year old win 10 computer I’m using until win 10 is no longer supported, and I can’t get office for free anymore.
When win 10 is no longer supported, that’s a Linux computer.
Would I be an idiot, if they cancelled support for mine? I guess so. I’m waiting for some edgelord to tell me I am, probably accompanied by y0u sH00d jUsT g0 LinUx n0w
Yeah, no rush.
Come on over to the Linux side when it suits you. You’re welcome to the family when you’re ready and that computer is ready. 🤟
Certainly will be, this is definitely the last windows I’m running. Cheers.
It was my sons school computer and it’s running education which for win 10 I have been happy with. One son has ditched win 11 and is running Bazzite now. The other is wound back to win 10 I think, but he’ll move
I’m in the process of deciding which distro to move on; I manage my sons NDIS so that’s front and centre; security of federal government records and claims.
Unless you have a specific use case in mind, or have a particular distribution that interests you, I can wholeheartedly recommend Fedora (GNOME or KDE version, either is good). I’ve not had any issues with it for a few years (I think I had some trouble with it in 2022, but nothing since then).
Thank you, not exactly no, just stable and secure.
I don’t game on it, just book keeping and I do a bit of correspondence. But yeah I need security because the federal government require me to keep records and I make claims through their portal. That’s particularly important now that what I’ve been doing for the last five years will soon become federal law.
The other thing is I’m not fond of allowing the American tech giants access to those parts of my records. Fortunately excel isn’t required for it. At this time the only American tech involved with it is MS.
They probably still came out ahead with 7 years of use without paying subscriptions to Microsoft.
Still not what they paid for though. 😐
I’m not one of them, but what makes them idiots? Seems kind of uncalled for.
It’s obviously a play on the common phrase that the honest guy ends up being the idiot. Not because the honest guy is stupid but because the honesty ends up backfiring. It’s used all the time in video game DRM contexts.
It was obviously not obvious to me, but okay. I’ll take your word for it. 🙃
From the OP of the original post: https://lemmy.ml/comment/26214965
Getting a Post not found on that one.
Weird. Works fine for me. Here’s the text:
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”
Ah okay, thank you for pasting that in for me.
I see, that makes sense, then. It was a bit hard to know that it was from that perspective. 😅
I think it’s just sarcastic
How is it sarcastic? I don’t get it, please explain, and please explain how that makes it better somehow.
It’s sarcastic because you obviously aren’t an idiot for buying a lifelong license to a product.
If anything most of the time it’s supposed to be the right choice (I’m only talking about licenced product, not ownership).
Especially if it’s a tool you use regularly.
At no point these people where supposed to “know better and not buy this”. Microsoft just did a rugpull.
I wasn’t aware of all the bullshit these companies were doing back in 2019, but I recall it wasn’t full blown enshittification yet.
For your second ask, it doesn’t make it better or lesser, it just adds shock value, engagement baiting.
You’re presenting an argument here which is purely based on logic. I think OP is not sarcastic, but actually believes people are idiots for simply buying Microsoft products. They are just being elitist. That’s my interpretation.
Could (hopefully) be wrong though! If OP gives another explanation I’m sure that’ll be true.
Anyone who pays to install software from a spyware company is incredibly naive to say the least
Must be like the vast majority of everyone alive that uses some kind of tech these days, then. 🤷♂️ I just felt like the title is over the top a little bit. If it had been in a comment it would’ve made me react less for some reason. 😄
I get it. You’re absolutely right it doesn’t make them idiots. Even I’m being hyperbolic to an extent. The real issue is much bigger and doesn’t stop at Microsoft. I get why people feel so powerless and end up going along with the status quo. Really, the fact that we’ve allowed it is more of a reflection on our collective Idiocracy.
It’s only morning here but I feel like this comment is the best interaction online I’m gonna have today.
Great response. And not because you agree with me but because it was even way more insightful than what I said.
Have a good one, friend. 🫶
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
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…
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.
Yes, it opens the files and can work with them. However to save them back to the original filetype, you need to export
Somewhat loaded headline
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
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.
Love it.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
classic Micro$lop
Spicy headline.
Dunking on tech giants is the only kind of spice that makes modern life palatable.
Yeah, but dunking on tech giants AND their customers.
The Verge: “You fool! You fell for one of the classic blunders!”
deleted by creator
So that means Microsoft doesn’t need to honor their contracts with users?
Interesting legal strategy, cotton.
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.
I was activating office installs for customers from the early 2000s not that long ago. Wtf happened that they are now disabling 2019?
It turns out that in modern versions (for Mac) they inserted a timebomb that disables the license check.
“Sorry the software now is EOL we can’t send an update to disable the timebomb that we set five years ago”
Users of office 2021 are luckier (for now) because it goes EOL in October, so they can receive the June patch that moves the July timebomb forward another five years
LIBREOFFICE is the answer!
