Escaping Microsoft
I don’t like Microsoft. I think their software is poor, and their business practices shady at best. Many years ago I switched to using Apple Mac computers, and haven’t looked back. However, for many people, Microsoft is considered essential. They must have Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Outlook etc.
In my working life, providing business email services, we’ve been battered a little bit by Microsoft. Here’s how it went…
In the 2000s and up to about 2016, Microsoft Exchange was their thing. People would install it on a server in their office, pay Microsoft many hundreds or thousands of pounds a year for the software, and then they’d pay a company like us to keep their email feed safe from Spam and Viruses.
Then came hosted Exchange. Reassuringly expensive, and still over-complicated for all but the largest companies.
Meanwhile, Microsoft were trying to find ways to earn more money from Word & Excel - The Office Suite, and they realised that they could earn far more if, rather than selling the software, and then charging for upgrades (which many people elected not to do), they rented in instead. And while they were at it, they could include email as well, to get people completely hooked into the ecosystem. Thus Office 365 was born.
For us, as a small business providing an email service for one or two pounds a month, this became a serious threat, as most businesses thought they needed Word and Excel, so the email service was effectively free along with the software.
As time has gone on, the pricing has gone up, now over £11/mon per user. Meanwhile, Microsoft continue to make shoddy software and force the upgrades on their users. The latest Outlook doesn’t even work properly with ’normal’ services like ours.
In a cruel twist of fate, Microsoft is having AI used against it. I recently came across a project called ArtCraft. They have used AI to code equivalents to pretty much all the Office 365 programs, both for Mac and Windows.
- Word -> WordCraft
- Excel -> GridCraft
- PowerPoint -> DeckCraft
And then there’s the Adobe software:
- Acrobat -> PdfCraft
- Photoshop -> PhotoCraft
- Lightroom -> LightCraft
Where will it all end? I don’t know. But what I do know is that paying Microsoft or Adobe a monthly fee to use their software is looking increasingly daft, and I quite like that.