That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. People bought a license to use a product, with the reasonable expectation that said license would be both perpetual and unchanging.
Yeah. I could see them deprecating O365 hooks and services or something, but the entire suite? That’s bullshit.
Yeah, Microsoft is gambling that the number of users who care enough to act are too small, or won’t bother, or won’t realise they can.
This is how big corporations get away with this shit. It’s not “illegal” in the criminal sense, but it is a breach of contract between Microsoft and those affected; and they likely could win against Microsoft.
The good news is the outrage over this is probably more damaging than any settlement or long drawn out legal case even would be. It’s at just the right time as Microsoft deals with major issues and unhappiness with Windows users over poor updates, crappy feature changes to Win 11 and of course force feeding of CoPilot down every users throat, while also decimating their own staff to save money for AI and polluting their own products codebases with shitty AI generated slop. Perfect storm has hit Microsoft, and they don’t even realise how bad it is yet.
How is this even legal?
If it is, in fact, legal, it’s because there’s a weasel clause in the clickwrap that says, in effect, “We can change this agreement in any way at any time. Not you, just us.”
Because it’s Microsoft and whether anybody likes it or not, they’ll do whatever they want and at best, lose a few pennies.
Because legislation related to Stop Killing Games has not yet passed.
$$$
Piracy is now fully justified
If buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing
This is the way.
If they can just break something I’ve paid for… then it is fair for me to take it without paying
How soon before they start doing this to Win10 installations?
LibreOffice is $Free.99, y’all.
I found that Pages and Numbers work just fine for me at home, and it comes included with my Mac. And if I’m truly desperate, Google Docs and Sheets are always a viable alternative.
Cool but if you handle complex documents with stuff like macros you’re straight out of luck. Even if you can get some compatibility you’re never going to be quite sure it will all work and look perfectly.
This is how Microsoft keeps their position.
I distinctly remember the conversations about Office’s phone home system and people specifically saying “this seems problematic” and Microsoft hand waving those concerns away.
it’s not the ‘phoning home’ that’s doing this. they built-in a time bomb by way of an expiring digital certificate. one that won’t get updated or replaced because the software versions in question are ‘out of support’.
Well it kinda is because that certificate is needed for the phoning home. If it didn’t need to communicate at all it wouldn’t have needed an SSL certificate so there would have been nothing to expire.
Literal planned obsolescence
These articles go from panic bait to feel good news after you completely switch away from Microslop,
