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.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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mehh I've been using Libre office for many years, fuck 'em.
If people are buying such software on their own dime, they're getting played. Happens once, OK you didn't know it was a con job. Happens twice, you're a fool...
But if it's on your company's dime, meh, not your problem.
Absolutely fair points but I think it should be illegal to sell a “perpetual” license - perpetual means everlasting - and then it turns out to not be perpetual
They should be forced to honor the perpetual contracts
perpetually in this insatnce means, for as long as they say
Yeah, I'd say they'd be looking at a class action suit if it weren't for the fact that it's just so easy to apply a pirate crack.
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
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
You think so? I only see an acurate representation oft reality
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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.
Seems like you feel superior to them
Agreed. I don’t know if this is the term for it, but I’ve been thinking of all this as “signaling disrespect,” a deliberate attempt to make people think of their peers as lesser, as other.
I feel like either people have been conditioned to do this online all the time for some reason, or maybe there’s some directed attack against civility. I don’t know. But I refuse to let myself be affected by it. I won’t hate people.
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Not sure why they’re idiots, trying to go the non-sub option is smart, doesn’t vote for subs. Microsoft is the asshole here.
Not sure why OP is sitting here tanking these hits, but I don't think OP meant to call people who bought perpetual licenses to Office idiots. I think they're saying that Microsoft thinks they're idiots. Still, OP should have clarified that or at least answered at least one person who asked.
Because it's a repost.
If you go to the original, OP actually has the top comment explaining exactly that: "idiots" refers to MS treating their customers as such, not a judgement by OP.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I'd argue trying to avoid yet another subscription by paying upfront was an honest and good faith strategy. The problem was assuming Microsoft also acts in good faith, and wouldn't just take the money and run like they have just 7 years in.
Honestly for things like this, I would struggle to be convinced that these folks aren't entirely within their right to take back what they already bought in good faith by pirating it.
After all, perpetual means you bought a license to use that program for life, regardless of whether Microsoft wants to uphold that or not.
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.
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OOP’s comment on the original post that the cross-poster should have shared:
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"
That’s not how words work
Victim blaming is definitely how you win people to your side... Dumbass
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classic Micro$lop
Not even worth pirating when there are better open source alternatives.
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