alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
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I believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0]
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests...
Been using LibreOffice for years. Everyone should. If we don't vote with our choices companies like Microsoft will keep pushing the envelope until you have to pay a monthly fee to turn on your own computer.
This shouldn't be legal. The software was clearly marketed as a classic fixed-in-time release, like the old CD releases, that would not be updated but would work indefinitely. Now they're going to boldly revoke the licenses???
When the pirated version is truer to the original contract than the official version. What a time to be alive.
I don't like the fact that a company can literally steal purchased product back from its users but I don't see how any company can realistically support a product for a long period of time, especially if it is a B2C perpetual license product
If Office 2019 got a zero day RCE just by opening a Word documents, the optics would be tremendously bad for Microsoft and they had to patch it, which cost money and time. We're on a day where zero day can be found using AI, and it's getting better at it every iterations. No, saying that it is EOL and "yeah not my problem" wouldn't fly at their scale, just see XP and how long they have to extend the support period
I'm not saying "but think of the multi-billion dollar company", I'm sure they can support it indefinitely, I'm just not sure if doing that is a good use of engineer's time
If not for the fact that some commercial software addons work only in Excel I'll be using only Libreoffice for everything. In fact that's the only major thing that's stopping me from totally abandoning Windows for Linux as well.
I'm guessing that's the situation for several others though there could be other use cases that's Excel only.
Instead of pressing Microsoft, it would probably make sense to force such vendors (SAP, Oracle etc) to release their office add-ons for Libre office.
That'll kill two very profitable birds with one stone.
This is the new way and we need to stop it now. Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software. Block them. This is what is wrong with cars too. Don't want to give them real time data on you and your passengers and instead try to disconnect the modem? Well, no car functionality for you even if it doesn't need it. -get mad- Stop taking it. Microsoft is the enemy and needs to be treated that way. Same with any tech company that does the bait and switch TOS world. I buy so little software now and it is hard, but unless we stop this now it will only get worse.
When I read "degrades functionality" I thought it was going to be some minor cloud-related feature, but holy shit they're disabling the ability to save files?? That article headline is really underselling it.
I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005. That is four mac computers total and I assume ~$600 in office licenses over 21 years. Not a ton of money but not zero.
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
How quickly certs went from "securing your software" to "securing our business model".
The best company to do Microsoft in is Microsoft.
They are responsible for awesome sales of MacBook Neo.
MS hates him! Find out this one trick they don't want you to know!
$ sudo pacman -S libreoffice
Time to get cracking I guess...
Did Apple pay them to drop support to boost their revamped Numbers/Pages/Keynote suite (ClarisWorks Infitniy.0).
Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …
Ironically my pirated copy of Office Mac will work perpetually. Arrr for the win.
Interesting that the deadline is checks notes one day before the Nightmare deadline. Definitely not a coincidence, right?
The last time I refreshed my Mac setup I didn't reinstall my standalone Microsoft Office, which I'd kept for the (very) occasional Word compatibility need.
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.
Fine, I'll continue with LibreOffice if Satya insists.
They have the nerve to degrade and call it now a view-only?!!! This is the reason why pirtacy is justified; it was a perpetual license. I hope Europe is watching and governments walk away
It's clear they don't want stand-alone Office anymore. One gets the feeling, given how Windows has devolved, that they'd like to rid themselves of all desktop software so they can focus on the backroom, perhaps because the data they could acquire is tastier.
I haven't read California's "Stop Killing Games" bill but I wonder how close this comes up against it or similar laws?
After Stop Killing Games [0] has been doing some big steps forward lately, plus movement in the same vein has been showing up in California, we now need to start working on a more general Stop Killing Software act.
I am impacted by this and am furious about it. Mostly because I'm reading about it here and not from, you know, Microsoft, of whom I am a customer.
If Apple can release updates for ancient iOS versions to update certificates years after the fact, then these fucking assholes can do the same. The auto-update functionality is there. They are choosing not to use it.
This is why TXT and MD and RTF exist. This is why CSV exists. This is (some of) why some governments are moving away from this junk.
But microsoft's incompetence keeps a lot of people employed.
If you only need to keep Office around to occasionally edit a file while preserving formatting, there’s now another option in 2026 - get a coding agent to do it for you. I’ve had Codex make substantial edits to financial model spreadsheets a few times, and it knows enough about how to modify office XML files to do that work correctly. Occasionally Excel didn’t like some of the files at first, but the view-only version of Office for Mac works well enough to allow Codex to discover and fix any incompatibility. Between agents and LibreOffice, no need for Office anymore.
I genuinely don't understand why anyone would ever make a business transaction with Microsoft.
Like, they're up there with crypto companies in the category of "This outcome was so inevitable that if you didn't expect it, maybe you should consider finding a legal guardian"
Don't forget, this is the same company that is killing Publisher with no true alternative to open existing .pub files. At least they aren't planning to rip Publisher away from perpetually-licensed users (yet).
I should’ve pirated instead of buying Office 2021..
Well, technically they never said the products would continue to function with the same functionality. But also this is Micro$oft, and I would've thought people would know by now that do only what's in their own interest.
I have a purchased copy of Office 2013 and they can pry it off my cold dead hands.
I am so glad that I am not forced to use Office. I know for some that they can't escape, but I would hope your workplace would cover it if so.
I personally get by just fine with the built in converter tools in Apple Pages and Keynote, they seem just as robust as the Microsoft counterpoints. To be fair, I don't have those super complex and advanced word processing needs.
Louis Rossmann's video:
s/perpetual/permanent
perpetual has pejorative connotations and only started appearing in marketing speak when software rental became the new business model.
Everyone got real loud when Windows 10 was killed off. And it happened anyway. I expect the same will happen this time, as do Microsoft.
Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.
What's with these companies? Netflix and Amazon Prime shoving ads despite charging people. Everywhere you see there's the greed to extract more and more.
I also don’t love how if you have a microsoft account, it will immediatley convert your perpetually licensed products into office 365 products and force you to reinstall.
I don’t understand why anyone would continue to use an EOL version of Office.
Only makes sense on an airgapped system that will never exchange files with the outside world.
Sound like Microsoft's given me permission to make some binary patches to return functionality I already paid for, and to share it with my 7 billion closest friends. Cool.
Microsoft 365 apps use a digital certificate to validate licensing. The certificate currently in use expires on July 13, 2026.
...and I'd almost be willing to bet that, as usual, the cracked version will remain perfectly functional.
Meanwhile 2016 is still working fine…. Until Rosetta support is dropped.
Anyone who has paid any $ to MS in the last 25 years will get exactly what they deserve.
This should be treated as an organised crime syndicate stealing the purchase price from every customer.
Just a few days before the release of EuroOffice, what a timing.
wow ... this has got to be illegal, right, right ??
This change would go against multiple consumer guarantees in Australia where it's 1) a right to have undisturbed possession of a product 2) products must be fit for the advertised purpose https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-servic... Microsoft would be breaking consumer law if the change goes ahead for the perpetual licenses they sold in Australia