[gwerbret]

I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.

I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.

So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? That vendor lock-in is obviously part of the con (see for instance the complete and very deliberate lack of portability of documents created in OneNote, if you don't have the Professional/Enterprise version). And there are innumerable better services out there, many of which are even free.

[aetherspawn]

We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore.

Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.

Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.

Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.

This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?

I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.

I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.

[baobun]

> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.

> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.

This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.

Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.

But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...

Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.

One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).

[jazzyjackson]

I’m on Team Airgap but I would expect that bringing on dedicated devops staff to maintain internal systems would blow away any cost savings and leave you at higher risk for downtime if the one Linux Wizard you hired to set it all up leaves for greener pastures. At least the SaaSs have a higher bus factor.

And then you have your security risks of duplicating your access control. So you mirror all your employees emails, now you have to make sure only administrators have read access and avoid ever exposing that system to the internet and prevent exfil.

I’m thinking of how to do this for a friends company and the amount of stuff that a SaaS takes care of is staggering. Right now I’m stuck on learning to be my own root CA to distribute client certificates for mTLS so I can avoid relying on third party SSO/auth.

[ajb]

I remember the days before SaaS. Sure we paid only once and self hosted services with open source, but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.

[dijit]

Out of interest, who's managing your mail, accounts, purchasing and computer setup now?

[scarface_74]

You pay $25 a seat to either Google (GSuite) or Microsoft. There is nothing to manage but signing into the account.

As far as computer purchasing, my latest employer had my computer shipped directly from Apple. Once I got it, I installed the mandated MDM software.

[zie]

You clearly have never dealt with their support system(s).

You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s).

With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way...

With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is.

With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.

[scarface_74]

What do you think can “break” with logging in to your Google account and using GSuite? It’s basically the same thing as the consumer version.

It’s the same with O365.

[cadamsau]

What I’ve observed is it becomes part of the job of the office admin person. So not zero headcount maybe 0.1 or 0.2 but that’s pretty good if the SaaS bill is another 0.2 headcount.

[ajb]

Well, at my previous company it was split between a few Devs. Annoying, but didn't take anything like a whole full-timer.

[dijit]

This is why it should be the c-suite making the final call, it might not seem like a lot of work but an hour of your time is in the region of $100-$150, but a full time IT person can be hired for €60/hr.

At some point your 0.2 becomes 0.3 and eventually crosses a threshold where it just makes sense to dedicate a resource for cost reasons.

[scarface_74]

“We” did no such thing. Major enterprises have been in bed with Microsoft since the late 90s.

Before that, they were running DOS on the client and Novell Netware on a server. Linux and “open source” has never been big in business.

[mbreese]

Weren't enterprises already on yearly contracts with licenses and support included? I know developer tools from Microsoft in the 90's had subscriptions, but I never dealt with Enterprise licensing back then. But, given some of the blanket enterprise licenses I did have to deal with, I always thought at that level it was always a subscription model.

I think the shift wasn't that the SaaS model is now new, but that the SaaS model was now also taking over consumer and small business accounts.

[StellarScience]

We used to buy Microsoft MSDN subscriptions, which got us constant upgrades of Visual Studio and other development tools. Those licenses were perpetual - you'd get a disk with e.g. Visual Studio 2007 on it, and you were legally entitled to use that version forever.

IIRC if we didn't think we'd need a new version anytime soon, to reduce costs sometimes we wouldn't purchase MSDN renewals.

I think Microsoft's licensing 20 years ago shows the prevailing view then was that companies wanted the certainty of perpetual licenses.

[scarface_74]

20 years ago, most businesses and consumers didn’t have reliable and fast internet. MSDN came in dozens of CDs/DVDs in a binder.

Back then, most people only had one computer and if you switched between Windows and Macs you had to buy a separate copy of Office. Now I can run Office on my Mac, iPad (and pair it with the same mouse and keyboard I use with my laptop), and iPhone. If I’m not near my computer but want to use Office on another computer, I can do it on the web.

There is also a lot more churn in the mobile space as far operating system and hardware upgrades that mean needing to update your apps. Despite bad blood between the two back in the day. Microsoft has been keeping up with the latest Apple hardware/OS initiatives since 1980.

[graemep]

> but we also needed a full time sysadmin/IT person for a 12 person startup. I'm not sure it worked out cheaper.

That sounds excessive even then. Its probably even more excessive now - some things are probably easier to manage on a small scale ~ there are a lot of tools for deploying and managing stuff.

[ajb]

The guy might have been a bit under loaded, at least after the initial burst, but given that SaaS wasn't available at the time I don't think there was a good alternative. Getting someone in part time would have been a false economy the first time something screwed up and they weren't in.

If it was a pure software startup we could have done without, but it was a semiconductor company.

[esperent]

> it's cost competitive with all the other email providers

Have you looked at MXRoute? We pay $65 per year for unlimited domains and addresses. Not a huge amount of storage space so there's a bit of education in getting people to share large files using another service, but otherwise it's great value.

[scarface_74]

No serious company is going to go that route instead of using GSuite or O365. It doesn’t even offer an SSO solution that you can link to all of their other SaaS products.

And now they have to use another solution for file sharing?

[esperent]

I run a serious company and we have found MXRoute to be a great fit.

The main alternative that we could budget for (since we're an F&B business in Vietnam and many options are too expensive) is the Google Workspace lowest tier. That only gives 30gb per user which is shared between email and everything else, so it's not that different really. We'd still have to be making sure people were not sharing huge files by email.

[scarface_74]

It’s different because you also get the complete office suite from Google.

Are you really saying the difference between $6/month for the lowest tier that you said is affordable and $12/month for a shared 2TB pool of storage would break the bank?

[jazzyjackson]

In think they said even $6 per month per user was a bum deal next to $65/year flat for unlimited.

[formerphotoj]

This. Should be a long German word for the unaccountable cost delta/savings?/increase? from digitizing and then maintaining APIs and such into at least 2038. Maybe AI knows what it is; I'll ask and get back to y'allz!

[junto]

Softwarelizenzverschlimmbesserung

“Verschlimmbesserung” is a great German word that describes “an attempted improvement that actually makes things worse”.

[croemer]

Digitalisierungsschattenpreise

[cookiengineer]

As a German, I approve this wording.

Basically, it's a Digitalisierungsschattenwucherbepreisungsskandal

[formerphotoj]

I'm having fun sounding this one out for myself! I like how it audibly bounces along via -ung -en -er -ei(eye) -ung and -al. Makes me wanna say, "Now That's Fahrvergnügen!" Or rather, Sprechenvergnügen?

[Terr_]

To save some folks a few clicks, "Digitization Shadow Prices".

[croemer]

This isn't a real word (yet) of course (at least no Google hits). Just made it up on the spot.

[valenterry]

I'm German and I wasn't sure if you made it up or if it existed before. :)

[zx8080]

> you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

Email saas vendor only lock-in seem to be the root of some vendor lock-ins.

[sam_lowry_]

> I write this while holding back tears (:/)

Dunno about all other things, but it's totally possible to self-host email. I do it for myself, and I did it when running the IT of a media company.

I now work for the government, and I know that sensitive mails go through foreign entities and none can do anything about it because we lost not only the skills but the understanding that mail can be self-hosted.

[graemep]

> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.

> I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing

Why not self-hosted alternatives?

> Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.

I find that hard to believe. Even cloud backup services are not that expensive.

[redserk]

> You can self-host and use a delivery service for outgoing.

Going from relying on a subscription SaaS service to…still relying on a subscription *aaS service. And you still have the cost of keeping someone on staff to maintain the server and be available at 3am and 3pm.

[raxxor]

You absolutely can host your own mail server. Or use one of your IT partner of choice. Out business still has an exchange. Today you have to jump through some hurdles with SPIF/DKIM, but it is still very possible.

[arielcostas]

You can also send out your emails via a relay, like Amazon SES, right? Host an email server (like opensmtd + Dovecot, or with Postfix+Dovecot), and forward external emails through SES.

[achrono]

>but wages are like 50x that these days

How is that even comparable? Said wage earners aren't even getting to choose which tool they use; let alone those two expenses being remotely comparable in qualitative terms.

[arielcostas]

They are compared regarding "cost to the company". A median salary in Spain is 24k€/year, plus social security, which makes it around 31k/yr per employee. Yet I've seen several companies using crappy services' free tier (definitely not targeted for businesses) because paying 140€/yr for MS365 Business Standard and 85€/yr for 1Password was too much when "we can use Google Drive [with 'personal' Google Accounts not controlled by the organisation in any way] for free, and KeePassXC synced through Drive".

Now, compare 250-300€/employee/year with how much you spend on salaries, and think how much it's hurting productivity to have these weird (and probably against TOS) arrangements, compared to just paying a few bucks for software.

[Workaccount2]

Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add".

Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.

[salgernon]

Worse than that, they change the design and location of the handle every other year, and then replace your toilet paper with 3 sea shells.

[gruez]

That sort of exists. You heard of home service plans? You pay a fixed fee to some provider, and they the cost to send a plumber/hvac guy/whatever if something breaks. For software, instead of getting your toilet unclogged, you get small features and bug fixes.

[cj]

Exactly this.

All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together.

So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment.

They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix.

Private equity is an underrated danger to society.

[FireBeyond]

Had one (thankfully not (directly) paid for), we had a heatwave and AC died.

So I call...

They "are having trouble" finding someone for "emergency service". Their idea of "emergency service" is "we have a company that will be out there in four WEEKS".

So I found someone who could come out that day, for a surcharge. Reasonable. And the AC was dead. But this company were nice - the tech said "no promises, no commitments" and he did some shifty magic and got it running for about six more hours before it was permanently to the graveyard.

So we started getting quotes for a new HVAC system.

Responses from the plan:

- we won't pay if you don't use our suppliers

- we won't pay if you don't choose from our list of models (which were all low end, 80%, 1 stage systems)

- even if you use our supplier, we won't pay above $X. If they quote you higher, the difference is on you.

- if you used another contractor for ANY maintenance work on the existing system, we won't pay

- if the maintenance schedule wasn't followed (whether you owned the system/property at the time), we won't pay

There's a common phrase in each of those statements.

[onemoresoop]

Any way we could fight this? It seems things are getting worse and worse and I don’t see any solution

[ndriscoll]

DIY it. Our dryer stopped heating, so I popped the screws off and it turns out the heating coil had burned out. Like $20 on Amazon. Our kitchen sink's faucet cracked and started leaking down the hose into the cabinet below so I bought a new one at Lowe's for like $20. Our oven stopped heating and the clock area where the control circuit is located kept clicking so I gave it a good smack like the primate I am. Free.

[LadyCailin]

Too bad the heating coil wasn’t DRM paired with the dryer, forcing you to have to contact an official repair shop, we could have gouged you for way more than $20.

[dh2022]

The examples you gave are much lower in scope than replacing an HVAC.... At various times I have done all of your examples. I do not dare to replace my home's HVAC system.

[netsharc]

The "Uber for dogwalkers" service had a problem that people would do an arrangement with the dogwalker outside of its 30% (or whatever) rent-seeking, it even had scary clauses trying to prevent this.

So maybe the solution is to ask the electrician, etc, if you can contact them directly next time, and to ask them if they know any other tradespeople when you need one.

[maeil]

Done this with a similar service, worked fine. Of course YMMV and not everyone is open to it.

[fakedang]

As comment below mentioned, DIY it. While the problem is "PE bad, hurr Durr", what usually happens is veteran plumbing, HVAC, etc businesses with loyal clientele get bought out for a pretty sum by the PE firm. I wouldn't fault them - why would you "work for yourself" when you could just take a nice 7 figure sum and retire or do something else? If your employees don't like it, they can go the same route and start their own thing - which will eventually get bought by PE too.

These are people who never had an exit opportunity before finally finding a way to sell their business for a nice lumpsum, instead of having to live job to job.

The only losers here are the customers and some of the employees, especially those who are undocumented.

[halfcat]

Become a plumber

[scarface_74]

Before we downsized from our home to our condo, I had a home gym with a treadmill, elliptical and a rower and I paid a fee each year for maintenance.

With so many moving parts and sweat getting on parts, things always needed replacing.

Also when I did have our home we paid service contracts for the yard, the weeds, termites and pest control.

When we turned it into a rental before we sold it, we also had a monthly home warranty.

But, in the case of MS Office, unlike Adobe, they still sell a copy with a perpetual license that you only pay for once.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.

I have Office 2010 on an old computer."

Statement #1 will trigger a stream of HN replies that ignore statement #2 and attempt to justify the price increase from $0 in 2010 to whatever Microsoft is charging today. It is anyone's guess why this happens.

The old computer is the author's personal computer, not one owned by an employer with a "Professional/Enterprise" license. This is clear from the final sentence of the comment.

The author is not the only recreational user who still has an old computer with Office 2010 (I have some other past versions of Office as well) and is aware of the con.

[zugi]

> I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.

True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost.

Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable.

Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.

[gruez]

>I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.

You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide filter for "office"

[userbinator]

untrusted docx/xlsx file

Contrary to what the propaganda wants you to think, I suspect the majority of people who have the brain to oppose are not opening every file that's sent to them by strangers.

[gruez]

The "majority" of people probably aren't clicking on untrusted links either, but we still advise people to keep their browsers up to date. Many people also need to open .docx files from strangers because it's part of their profession/business. Small business owners need to read RFPs and pay invoices, and jobseekers might need to open a questionnaire from a potential employer, all of which could be in .docx. The sender doesn't even have to be malicious. It's possible for one person, who's used to opening untrusted documents on a regular basis (eg. recruiter), to get infected, and for the malware to infect other documents that person sends to others (eg. finance).

[MichaelZuo]

That’s more of an issue with the network security then?

And even if computers didn’t exist, it still would make no sense to assume every single person is competent 100% of the time… at any company. Human beings are fallible, and that has to be factored in.

[hulitu]

> You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite.

Is there any "patched" office suite up there ? Microsoft was never famous for its security and Google is of "ship it first, fix it later" and "extend the attack surface as much as possible" philosophy.

[netsharc]

Huh, there must be(tm) a scanner for malware for these files. I know they're XML, although I wonder how much of it end up being base64-encoded binary blobs...

[danpalmer]

I've long felt that consumer acceptance of this pricing correlates with whether the subscription has a cost-of-good-sold component.

Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.

[gruez]

>and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.

You underestimate the technical sophistication of the average user. Even with perfect docs, there's going to be 1% (or whatever) of customers that call into technical support asking questions. That's essentially COGS.

[danpalmer]

Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support. In the same way, marketing costs vary wildly per sale and are very hard to attribute, which is why marketing is usually not a part of the COGS.

[gruez]

>Sure there's always going to be someone, but it's hard to attribute a specific figure for support cost to any given sale (you don't know about future support requirements, or for a subscription when do you account for support costs). This is why COGS usually doesn't include support.

By that logic, do cloud companies need to factor storage costs into COGS? Most people don't store exactly 1TB when they get the 1TB plan, and many don't use anywhere near that amount. Does that mean dropbox can pretend their offering has 100% margins? Sounds unlikely. The principle of accounting is that the numbers should reflect the actual business. Customer support costs don't have to be allocated to sales with 100% accuracy, but they can't pretend it doesn't impact unit economics either.

[danpalmer]

Look, I'm not an accountant, if there's one here to correct me on this I'm keen to hear it. I can understand that it may be useful to associate customer support costs to accounts in some ways. It obviously impacts unit economics. But none of that is what COGS is about (again, marketing is a major factor in unit economics and not traditionally considered in COGS).

COGS is about me as a customer buying a widget, receiving a widget, and the seller having to have made me a widget. That's an incomplete view of a business, but incomplete views can still be very useful. Understanding customer support cost for example must be done over some time horizon, i.e. what's the 6 month post-purchase support cost, which means we don't know the cost for 6 months. COGS is known much faster.

As for whether it should include storage, or any other particular piece of technology, for a SaaS business, I guess that probably depends on the business. The important bit for accounting is the direct cost of providing the service. If you're renting out GPUs by the hour then clearly a GPU hour is a direct cost. If you're just hosting a web app and not selling any particular slice of infrastructure then that's probably not a direct cost. Fixed size plan storage is probably somewhere in the middle, although cloud storage is clearly a direct cost.

Still, my point is really that businesses should only use subscription pricing when there's ongoing COGS, because that's what people intuitively associate with ongoing value most of the time.

[duxup]

Office suites are particularly annoying as for a home user ... most people don't use much at all.

If it wasn't for the office sort of standard, you can get away with just not using an office suite, lots of good options out there. Free / surprisingly capable apps.

[ndriscoll]

I'm weird and use TeX for my resume because I'm an annoying nerd, but I literally have not encountered an Office document in over a decade. I see Google workspace at work for my last couple jobs, and there's libreoffice if I occasionally want a spreadsheet at home. Everything I encounter from banks and governments is web or pdf these days.

[duxup]

For personal stuff I agree, I haven't found an office suite necessary.

[int_19h]

You can still buy Office 2024 as a proper app without any of that cloud stuff if you want to.

[Mistletoe]

And what if I want it as a program instead? :)

[halfcat]

You mean floppies, right? Yeah, like a stack of 26 floppies that you can own and use forever.

[725686]

Could you please point me where to buy it?

[WarOnPrivacy]

Stacksocial has been doing Office promos for years. They're inexpensive, forever licenses but I'd guess they aren't transferable. I've bought a dozen or two.

https://www.stacksocial.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=offi...

Techspot has deals on Office 2024. https://www.techspot.com/news/96637-microsoft-office-lifetim...

[switch007]

Stacksocial looks like one of those many dodgy sites selling licenses of questionable origin

How can you be sure they are bona fide Microsoft licenses?

[bloqs]

Stacksocial originated that style of selling discounted licenses I think. Been using them for years also

[switch007]

That doesn't answer my question

I'll go out on a limb and just claim they're grey market. Someone can prove me wrong

[mh-]

Wasn't aware of these sort of deals.. would love something like this for the Adobe suite.

[bubblethink]

The ultra cheap ones are grey market. Someone reselling something they are technically not supposed to.

[WarOnPrivacy]

I'm familiar with greymaket sellers but these aren't them. Stacksocial brokers software deals as fundraisers for major websites. They've been around a long time.

[rchaud]

Stacksocial link is returning a 500 error.

[bonestamp2]

It's the item in the third column: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...

[brewdad]

It's available through Costco. I'm sure Amazon and other similar retailers have it as well. 2024 Version.

[torton]

Woot has licenses for sale every so often. About $30 for the 2021 version the last time I noticed.

[scarface_74]

Dropbox’s 2TB plan is $120. Office 365 is $129 with 1TB each for 6 users.

[what-the-grump]

And you get anti-virus and credit monitoring with that...

[rawbot]

> So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost?

OneDrive Family plan is still the cheapest and largest cloud storage (6TB of cloud storage for $99/year).

[anytime5704]

Yeah, but then you have to use onedrive…

[kyriakos]

I see a lot of people complaining about this, what exactly is wrong with onedrive as opposed to Google drive or Dropbox? Haven't used Dropbox in many years. They all just sync files which is what I need them for.

[anytime5704]

I’m just one person. So take my opinion for what it is: just my opinion.

I started using Dropbox in high school and it has always “just worked”. I use the native app on Windows, iOS, and OSX. It’s essentially a virtual drive on all my devices and it backs up all my phone’s pictures and videos automatically. I can probably count on one hand the number of times Dropbox has annoyed me in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s overpriced, but at least it’s reliable. That’s worth a lot to me.

I experimented with Google drive as an alternative in college. It worked pretty well on android devices, but there was just enough friction on other OS’s that I abandoned it as a general file system. My g drive is basically just a graveyard of Google docs that I will never care to organize and random gmail attachments that ended up there for whatever reason.

Onedrive is by far the last choice I would make. My only experiences with it are (1) when Microsoft tries to force it on me/upsell me when I’m using office on my personal desktop or (2) when an employer uses it as their approved file sharing system. In my experience, it is consistently the least reliable of the three solutions. While Dropbox “just works”, I fully expect Onedrive to “just make me restart my computer, sign out and back in again, give up and just share the thing through slack.”

Again, just my experience.

[TiredOfLife]

I used Dropbox until it stopped just working, added 3 device limit and gated the cloud drive feature under much more expensive teams plan. And switched to OneDrive. Google drive app always was wonky and used filenames to store internal state (breaking for example Calibre database)

[scarface_74]

OneDrive works perfectly on my Mac and iOS devices.

[centur]

You still can buy Office standalone licenses with Classic Office (aka desktop apps). I got myself 2019 and 2021 versions (different OSes) and prefer them. However I've a personal MS365 subscription for business, I like permanent licenses for products more. On a related note - I bought some permanent licenses for devtools, where they advertised subscription model only :) Directly reached developers and asked if it's possible or not. Works well for both sides - I probably paid for the tool more than their average subscription lifetime, but I've got few tools that I need to use occasionally but over a longer period of time - e.g. one tool I used maybe 10-15 times, but over a 7 years. That does not work with bigger companies though :(

[TZubiri]

So we should pay google engineers for making a saas app.

But we should fire microsoft engineers for making a cost efficient binary.

Not saying that's wrong, just reframing.

Also this debate is so 2000s, we've been over this, things need updates, for security at least. Who's gonna pay for it.

[tomjen3]

A few gigs?

It is (or was) cheaper to signup for 365 than by the same storage in dropbox. It is cheaper to get that package than get Zoom.

[darthwalsh]

Right, I've never heard 1,000 called "a few!"

[Hilift]

Windows Enterprise edition has been subscription-only licensing for several years. The lowest edition cost is about twice that of Professional over a five year period.

[Aurornis]

You can still buy the latest Office for personal use with a one-time purchase.

[joe5150]

Do you mean "more appropriate for" businesses? Because 365 is definitely targeted at individuals, nation states, and everything in between.

Microsoft's home page is advertising Microsoft 365 "For 1 person" literally as I type this!

[int_19h]

Office 365 is very much targeted at personal users, as well. I mean, it literally has a "personal" plan (and also a "family" plan).