Unfortunately the inevitable enshitification of our lives by capitalism will continue, even if we remove it from our lives as much as we are able.

What microsoft does to its products, it also does to our governments and civil liberties, social media does to society and democracy, data brokers do to privacy, zillow does to housing security, wallstreet does to economic mobility and financial regulations, etc, etc, etc.

Yeah office isn’t the what orgs care about losing with this change. Business premium was the lowest cost license option available to non-profits that allowed access to identity management using entra.

And if you need it in a browser, there is Collabora, which exists as a paid business version with support or a free non-support version, that can easily be deployed with Nextcloud. Another alternative would be CryptPad.

If you also need your mails in your browser, there are multiple providers like mailbox.org that offer mail encryption even through the online mail interface.

Sometimes I find myself annoyed by Lemmy users. We love to tout foss alternatives, even when they don't work as well, or aren't nearly as polished.

Libre office is a different story, it has everything you'll need, it's really complete, it does everything you want and it can read any format you throw at it and save its output in any format you need. It launches faster than Microsoft office, it's more stable, I really have absolutely no complaints, everyone should be using it.

GNOME Evolution is also a good outlook alternative and am pretty sure it was made as a open source alternative to outlook

The french government is kinda doing that right now

Google is so fuckin greedy lmao

Ah cool Google. We’re all set then. Totally different…

Google offered Workspace free to individuals. I set that up and used it for my family, and then BAM! After a lomg time using it, they removed the free plan, once we were using it for logins for a bunch of sites and for our emails. Went from free to $50 per month. It took a LOT of effort to get my family off of that. Never again.

Hey remember when Google used to have a motto, "Don't be evil"?

Used to.

They aren't as greedy yet. It will come.

I've read horror stories of an employee doing something on their own personal account and Google locking out the whole business. Hopefully they fixed that idea because it would sink business uptake.

I don't trust any of these "giving pledges" upon death. In name, their fortunes will pass on to nonprofits. Nonprofits controlled by their family members, which comes down to letting them keep their inheritances tax-free. This even happens in Europe.

I thought from the headline that it was just a downgrade to Business Standard, no this is to Business Basic! That's a huge yikes, it's so much harder to be productive in those web versions.

I honestly would not be surprised if users work out installing LibreOffice et al. so they can still have a desktop app experience because of this move.

Sadly. An example: I work at a small school that does not have an IT department. Staff and teachers are nearly IT-illiterate, and the students can hardly be coaxed to do stuff on a laptop instead of their phones. So installing Linux would add an additional hurdle for both. Probably much smaller than they think, but still: it heightens the threshold to even consider switching to Linux.

There's a few people who know that Linux is just as valid as Windows, but who would they trust to make the switch safely. Me? I'm not a professional. So they'd have to pay someone, properly. And then it all comes down to money again which usually comes down to "let's not change anything".

So for now I'd just be happy if they used LibreOffice instead of MS365.

The same goes for Google Workspace. Making the effort to roll your own (totally possible with FOSS) would require to pay at least 1 person, and some sort of transitional period. It's cheaper and easier to pay none and just blame it on Google when things don't work as desired. These people just don't see it as a priority. Don't understand the dangers.

There's really no competitor for large orgs with robust technology needs.