Microsoft Announcement Office 2021

[Sky-Knight]

@britechguy I said what I said about M365 because of the numbers I put in the post above.

Can you find cloud storage that can do what OneDrive can do cheaper than OneDrive can do it? Because using Box, Dropbox, iDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud... you can't. Every single one of those systems wants a single residential user, or family of 6 to pay about the same money per month for just storage when Microsoft gets you the office suite too.

Not to mention the ability for parents and children to be looking at the same file at the same time, despite being in different physical locations. Have you helped your grandkids with their homework yet from your couch? I'll bet you haven't... because you still don't think M365 drives value the likes of which nothing else can touch.

And if you can duplicate even a basic feature set, you're doing so spending at least the same money. So you aren't winning, you're losing.

I'm not "in thrall", I've spent buckets of time digging through market offerings to get where I am. So continue being an anti-vaxer... I'm done. Enjoy your ignorance. Curse me for trying to help you make more money.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Broadly, I accept that. I do not accept what you're pushing, it's that simple. You are, as I said earlier, in the thrall of M365. It's all you push. It is not the correct, nor desired, tool for a great many users. And I don't think that you could even force that immediately previous sentence from your lips.

I, on the other hand, can and do understand that, for certain people, in certain contexts [which, by the way, are many], M365 is an excellent fit.

I don't need cheap shots to make my point. I can also accept that just because I think something best, it may not actually be best, because there are things I do not know.

And with respect your leaving money on the table because you have refused to learn a product and don't see the benefits.

Or to put it more bluntly, be glad we are not in the same market. For I would try and take your clients by pitching a product that will increase productivity and lower costs.

 

[britechguy]

And with respect your leaving money on the table because you have refused to learn a product and don't see the benefits.

And with respect, and accepting everything you've said above, one of the reasons I have "refused to learn a product" is because, just based on what I have learned, both about the product, and my own clients, I cannot sell it to them. They just don't want it. I can't, and have no desire to, try to make them want it. It's just gross overkill for them in virtually all respects. And there are still a lot of people, as @Philippe noted, who want nothing to do with cloud storage, period. And that's not rational, but if you will not accept that many client decisions are not rational (and, in fact, many of our own decisions about a lot of things aren't rational) then you'll waste your time, and often cause a ruptured relationship, by pushing the issue.

If you were to think you could persuade my clients, and we were in the same market, I'd tell you to have at it. I expect that in pretty short order the views expressed by myself and @Philippe would start making a lot more sense to you. Just as your views about other market segments do make a lot of sense to me, for those segments.

And I have said before, and this will be the last time I say it, when I am discussing something in the vast majority of cases it has the residential market as the milieu that I'm talking about. I shouldn't have to explain that again and again, nor should it not be easy to understand that what I say about my clientele and market is often not applicable to other market segments. I understand that about those discussing other market segments that they routinely serve, and have even openly professed my ignorance about certain aspects of those markets, because I don't serve them. That kind of ignorance does, believe it or not, appear to work both ways.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I love people that reject the cloud, because they're paranoid about fires. Then I get to sell them a horde of stuff that's vastly more expensive than renting space in someone's cloud doing it themselves. There is one industry however I've found is different... farming. Farming is incredibly technical, but connectivity is a problem. In these cases we Unifi as much of the property we can, and wind up using something like NextCloud because it can run entirely on the farm. I back that NextCloud up online if possible, and if not... we build a 2nd data closet in an outbuilding somewhere to stuff a storage device in it. But this is a dying market, because 4g is enough for M365, and 5g is expanding in rural markets as we speak.

It's all literally fire insurance, that's the angle I use to break the ice you're saying cannot be broken. And you're right it doesn't always work. But those people aren't going to be customers long anyway.

 

[britechguy]

But those people aren't going to be customers long anyway.

You keep insisting on this, yet "those people" have been some (note, some) of my customers for well over a decade now. And I have no reason to believe that many residential customers who fit the "reject the cloud" mode, particularly the senior set, won't still be around for quite a few years yet.

What I find interesting, and perhaps it's not as common as I think, is that there is a bell curve of "tech geekdom" where I (at just short of age 60) am in the start of the upper side age tail of that curve, and where the lower end is now 40, at lowest, where people actually understand a lot more about computer technology because they had to deal with the nuts and bolts of things in its early days. My true senior citizen clients tend to be "afraid of breaking something" (no matter how often they're directly told, and shown, that they can't, really) and most of the youngsters 30 or under, while being incredibly slick power users, are like a deer in the headlights when something breaks. I find trying to discuss, even in the most "user friendly" of terms, a lot of what would be advantageous to them causes instant "glazing over" and/or "halt, I don't want to deal with that," type reactions. And when you get either, other than perhaps the slightest bit of trying to change tack to see if you can pry open another channel, you better stop. It ain't happening.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@britechguy Yes, I have no doubt they've been your customer for more than a decade. What I'm saying is they won't be your customer in ten years.

And I've noticed the same difficulties in user training, but that's also another rub... When I use Windows 10 and M365 services as designed, the less the user knows the better! I have a higher success rate with those users, because they just let the system log them in and do whatever it is they want to do. It's the power users that are constantly making more work for themselves and breaking things.

 

[britechguy]

What I'm saying is they won't be your customer in ten years.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that. I know that a lot of my current clientele will "no longer be with us" in the literal sense, in ten years.,

But I've got plenty of clients who are younger than I am, but were never forced to deal with the nuts and bolts of computers, who share exactly the same attitudes, and skill sets, and who will very likely "still be with us," and their businesses still alive, ten years hence.

There is way more "business inertia" in a lot of small businesses than I believe you recognize. And it's not the kind of inertia that dooms them, but makes them stay as they are, and keep the clientele that's been happy with them for a very long time. There are a very great many people who will, and do, fight change, even change that would be positive for them, tooth and nail, and generally are completely irrational in their thinking about the things they're doing and/or resisting. I've mentioned this quotation on many occasions, but it was only once I absorbed its absolute truth into the fiber of my being that things became much, much clearer to me in a very great many contexts:

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
~ Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

My life in this business became much easier on me once I realized that my only duty is to do what's asked of me. I make a point of doing value added education, but the decisions about what to do with that are not mine. And since I value the principle of independent agency of all sane (and the unreasonable are not insane or mentally compromised) adults, I know that their decisions, and the consequences from same, are theirs and theirs alone to make.

I still have people convinced that backing up is not necessary because, "I haven't had a failure in 25 years, and that's as long as I've been using computers," or similar. Even posing the usual educational questions, presenting real-life disaster stories, and emphasizing what cheap insurance a backup is remains unpersuasive. And when that happens, I know they bear the consequences and I have done my duty to try to prevent negative ones that could be prevented.

 

[Philippe]

I'm honestly shocked you're having issues on any sort of available modern bandwidth.

2 separate cases: Both having their desktop files synchronized / on the cloud.
First one was MS explorer hanging (files on OneDrive), 2sd one was "finder" hanging (files on iCloud).
I just removed the synchronized desktop and everything worked perfectly. Both having ADSL.

I start with facility fires as an example

Yes, I'm doing 100% residential, and house fires are almost non existent around here. So, you know, my clients really don't care, and if their house burn the last thing they'll care about it's their computer & data...
It's hard enough to explain them they do need a local backup. Very few of them understand the cloud and even less use it.
I know it's different with businesses and I agree most of my clients don't need MS Office and when I can, I'm moving them to LibreOffice now.
But the ones who do need MS Office always choose the standalone version when I ask them what they want & I explain the differences.

The whole "subscription" idea sounds very strange to a lot of people, me included...

 

[britechguy]

I'm moving them to LibreOffice now.

Definitely take a look at SoftMaker Free Office, or even their paid version, which is dirt cheap compared to MS-Office that's "the closest edition." It has a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation manager and they are as similar in look and feel to MS-Office as I've ever seen. I am genuinely surprised that Microsoft never sued them, and perhaps they did, but given the amount of time it's been available, and its look and feel remains almost eerily MS-Office like, they clearly won if a suit ever was involved. It also allows those users who hate, hate, hate the ribbon interface to choose a classic menu driven interface.

 

[Philippe]

Definitely take a look at SoftMaker Free Office

Good to know. It seems to be a German company.

 

[sapphirescales]

The day that Office goes subscription only is the day I either give up Office completely or live with the risks of using an unsupported version. I don't want OneDrive. I wouldn't trust Microsoft for email or cloud if they were the last option on earth. You don't need to use OneDrive to have versioning or cloud backup, there are other solutions for that. I personally use CrashPlan for cloud backup as well as Backblaze. I also have local backups. I have no desire to pay monthly/yearly for a freaking typing program.

 

[VISA MC]

I agree with much of what was said already on M365 not being for everyone. We do use it in our office and I am well aware of the capabilities but as others have said, those values are not there for every business.

I look at some of the clients I’ve visited this week. Restaurants for example. They have some data in excel sheets or word but much of their daily routines are in vendors online portals or their point of sale systems. They aren’t going to use teams or share point. They aren’t going to give every server, bartender, cook etc an account to login to so they can chat or share files. Most use some messaging platform with group text to communicate. The value isn’t there for them.

A towing company - again not going to issue accounts and use teams to communicate. Very little data, all paper receipts. They could use it to back up quickbooks data maybe.

Just talked to a construction company today that uses sage. Sage stores files outside of the documents folder and gets corrupted if the wind blows too hard, so keeping that file out of share point / one drive is a must. In fact the only way you can share the file is over a local network. SageCloud corrupts the files almost weekly. I see a tiny bit of benefit but their internet connection is satelite and their blueprints are huge PDF files. Using a cloud sharing service vs just going across the LAN does not make sense for them.

To say that every business absolutely needs to use M365 to survive, I invite you to tour a few of my business clients. They’ve been in business for 100+ years, do 7 figure annual incomes and have no desire or need for collaboration tools etc. To see how they run their business and offer them tools that truly would help them is how we gain and keep our customers.

 

[NETWizz]

Most businesses that make 7 figures have collaboration tools, but there are folks that do things in strange ways.

Regardless, when I read this the first thing I did was say to myself, "oh, look... another version of Office; just what the world needs *sarcasm* because the current version (whatever it is) is somehow immature and incomplete ... we just cannot wait to replace perfectly-good, up-to-date software with a new version that does the exact same thing in every which way"

Then I got to thinking Office 2021 and 2 years? I asked myself, "Is office 2019 the current version? I thought it was Office 2016 last I remember seeing it."

Then I did some checking to see what version I am running being it is up-to-date, and I cannot remember ever actually paying for it.

Turns out my employer is paying for a subscription, and I have Office O365, which is Office 16, which is the same as Office 2016 or Office 2019... and probably the same as Office 2021 being all are Office 16.

Regardless, I really don't care. It is up-to-date and works very well, but it is really not much different than Office 2010 really aside from some shared BS we have on our internal One Drive, which is seamlessly integrated: