this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I'm going to take a slightly more nuanced take on this as someone who works in the enterprise software ecosystem.

Microsoft doesn't just sell office to the government or university anymore. Their Microsoft 365 subscriptions include e-mail, office, intranets, communications, security, collaboration tools, and even more.

You can replace the office part with Libre Office no issues, and for home use I would absolutely recommend that instead of paying for a Microsoft license, but the moment you need to start building your own e-mail servers, file sharing systems, getting software for messaging and video calls, etc. the price (software, hardware, maintenance, tech support) goes up to well above what Microsoft charges.

Unfortunately, Microsoft provides decent value.

I'd love to see a non-American competitor that offers such a comprehensive business package, but there isn't even a realistic American competitor at this point, Google is the closest with Google Docs/Sheets, Gmail, Google Meet, Google Drive but having used it extensively it's still falls short of what Microsoft is doing and of course it's also American.

If you need to sign up to 6 different companies to get the same functionality coverage it's never going to be as integrated, as easy to use, or as cheap.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Many of the things you listed are available as free software through opensource projects. Microsoft just bundles it all making it easy.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And runs the server required stuff on their own hardware.

I mentioned this in my comment.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Which is cheap. You can run a lot on a pi these days. Or setup a higher powered nuc. MS chargers for server and now named user licenses.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You can not run enterprise business functions on a pi unless your "enterprise" is made up of a single user.

Even something like basic video steaming for internal training videos would kill it due to encoding issues. Let alone the impact from one service affecting others like a user file transfer affecting the speed of messaging or email, or a complex database activity momentarily taking out your task management application.

You would need a dozen of them for splitting services and redundancy, then a UPS and redundant internet connections. It would end up costing you a few thousand dollars just in hardware before you even started paying someone to set it up and keep it running.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 0 points 18 hours ago

We selfhost a lot for work. Was paid services before but cost kept creeping up. Companies have IT anyway, so it is really not a huge expense to manage your own services.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

It's really unfortunate, but this is completely true. Microsoft has a virtual monopoly on the integrated business suite, and between cost and ease of use, nobody else, nor any combination of competitors, is even close.