There was a time when gsuite was a scrappy little service that gave you a serious option that wasn’t Micro$oft (which at the time was deep into shady monopolistic practices) at a fraction of the price with replacements that were good enough for most small businesses.
If memory serves, the initial price was around $20 or perhaps $50 a YEAR per user. It was a steal if you were used to paying 10 times that for an annual subscription to Microsoft Office Pro plus needing to support a local NT server running Microsoft Exchange and probably a file server that needed backups and antivirus and on and on.
As more and more businesses have gone SaaS and put the whole thing in the cloud, Google has capitalized on this by cranking up the prices while probably scanning and using our data for their benefits somehow (mostly without adding additional features… Google Sheets is nowhere close to feature parity with Excel).
Thankfully we now have way more FOSS and private cloud solutions such as Nextcloud.
I still can’t help but notice, however that feature-wise we really haven’t gone anywhere in 25 plus years.
Injecting AI buttons into Google Workspace or whatever they call it now is probably not a feature that too many of their customers are asking for. But in the never ending push to increase revenue, it seems like now we’re going to get it and that’s the justification for the latest price jump.
I was checking recently for a side thing I’m helping with and Google’s base tier is $7/month/user vs Microsoft’s Business Basic, so no desktop apps, but basically fully equivalent to Google was $6/month/user. I was honestly flabbergasted.
Is it worth a dollar a month to not use teams?
Interesting, that’s got to be intentional. Microsoft was so slow to webbify their Office suite (and probably thought why should we?it’s printing money!) that they lost out on a generation of startup companies.
The thought of switching back to Microsoft hasn’t even crossed my mind since I moved everything to Google around a decade ago. But now I’m actively de-googling because they’re starting to mess with the core solutions.
Yeah same thing with slack
They’re also bundling AI with their most expensive tiers. More than likely logging 100% of that revenue towards AI to justify this whole boondoggle.
Wtf is google offering that you’re paying for anyway? advertising?
Storage on google drive comes to mind. Not that I pay for it, but I know it’s something others do.
Google Workspace (GMail, Meet, Calendar Drive, Docs, Sheets, …) is a popular alternative to MS365 among companies.
🤢
Things change.
Ten years ago I joined a newly formed small company. They were all-in on the google suite for everything, and it was great. Gmail, docs, meet, all joined up really well and fully cloud so everyone could work just as easily from home as in the office, with no on-prem hardware or VPNs or anything. It made the work so productive.
But of course enshittification happens, corps get evil, and everything goes down the toilet.
These days I am degoogling as much as possible and would never choose g-suite again, either personally or for business, but 10 years ago for that small business it was a godsend.
when AI came around, they realized ai is costing too much, so they have to force it on customers to make them pay off thier debt.
It’s not like 365 is so great anyway
Cancel sounds great! 👌
Dont use subscription services.
Pay for services that respect their users
FTFY
Proton mail, mullvad, bitwarden to name a few
This does not work for nearly 100% of people. Fucking health insurance is a subscription. Guess a lot of Americans don’t have them, though.
Use Microsoft 365
Use LibreOffice and some more independent cloud services!
Poor choice for most businesses.
why would free and open source software be bad for a business?
Microsoft literally pulled this exact trick earlier this year. Gave me an email with a ‘your subscription is increasing from $100 to $150 this year so we can offer “AI” features’ and i was like ‘oh those exact features that forced me to roll back to a 6 month old version of office to get rid of because you cant just ‘toggle’ it off in settings, and specifically emailed you to tell you this, those features you mean?’. Turns out if you go to unsubscribe they offer you a ‘budget plan’ (or however they worded it) which doesnt include “AI” features for wow, only the same price it was already paying to get me to stay. What an offer.
I was doing the right thing by them but if your gunna take the piss mate, im putting on the hat and taking to the seas.Out of all the options, you somehow landed on the one thing that’s actually worse. I’m genuinely kind of impressed.
Nah, y’all just like to screech at MS while ignoring that the office is by far the most complete product in that space.
But I guess MS has brainwashed hundreds of millions business and it’s actually trash 🙄.
It’s so painfully obvious when folks who have no experience in this area screech about M365.
I agree that its the one (at least i) was able to work with best BUT when i really need an office product thats fancier than LibreOffice i would choose Softmaker because it works very similar, is cheaper & not primarily there for shareholders
And you poor guy talked about a ms in a space where a lot dont like ms
Too many people not understanding that these suits are more than editors 🤦♂️
They are workplace tools. With an IdP, backups, MDM fleet management, rbac, litigation holds, etc.
I can use libre office which gets all my needs done, I see that as complete.
Do you run a business? Do you need an IdP and role based access? Do you need to back up emails and documents from your employees? Do you need IT insurance to cover your ass or have compliance needs?
Then maybe you aren’t the primary audience for these tools.
I work it for an organization with roughly 3000 people, and we have compliance needs. Ones that may conflict with Microsoft automatically backing up excel files with SSNs that are being worked on to an off premise cloud 2000 miles away.
M365 absolutely provides controls for that. You can have it scan your entire SharePoint/one drive for PII, phi, cc, etc. you can even prevent it from saving it you really need to be critical about it.
Sure, and now go ahead and hire engineers at 150k a pop to support it and talk to me about the about the labor hours you spent getting it set up, integrated, and maintained.
You aren’t fighting against the ability to do so, you are fighting against doing it at $120 per user for the year.
Additionally the nextcloud plan that is comparable to Ms business tier is now expensive with less features 🤣
I guess we better just lie down and give up against the capitalist machine then.
Why strive for better when our masters and superiors can do everything cheaper than us?
Microsoft is shit, for a myriad of reasons. From the quality of the products they sell, to monopolistic anticompetitive practices, to supporting genocide in Gaza.
Not everything in the world is about money and convenience.
Ok, but if the goal is “avoid paying for AI I don’t want”, M365 is worse. They were one of the first companies to start bundling it into every license tier available.
They didn’t immediately raise their prices when they started bundling it, but it’s the same tactic of using whatever tricks they can to inflate user numbers of AI.
Edit: In agreement with your main point though. Lots of angry people on lemmy who aren’t the target audience for MS products and don’t actually use it who make a ton of noise about it.
Still cheaper than Google though, AND better policy on training data and residency.
I’ve managed an MSP. I have cursed them too many times. Trust me I get annoyed with random teams shit.
Unless you gave me 5x the budget or already have a large team of engineers I’d never ever advise a business to roll their own. It just doesn’t make sense.
100%. Never been in management, but I’m in sysadmin/engineering/minor architecture design.
I feel like every time I get frustrated with MS’s bullshit, within a day I’m dealing with even worse from some non-MS system we have at my workplace that should have a dedicated team assigned but doesn’t.
Adobe is doing this too and unless their AI is going to fix the legacy bugs the company clearly doesn’t care enough to fix then it’s not good enough to cost more.
Affinity
GIMPEtc.
Oh don’t even get me started. I know so many softwares and their limitations and if I could cut Adobe completely out of my workflow I wouldn’t wait another second.
Google wants to replace most of its features with gemini powered tools. This is just the beginning. They own youtube and of course they’re starting to train their models on that too, they have a deal with reddit so they’re also turning all known internet forums into a huge database.
It’s so weird because Gemini is one of the dumbest of these bots out there.
It was six months ago but not anymore
Still fucking garbage lol.
Once the feedback loop really kicks off then we’ll see it turn to shit faster than all the rest.
They already wrote they trained it on YouTube!
Weirdly its good in image/video analysis in my testing???
but it doesnt filter properly and easy to bypass when using the APIThey’re all very “dumb” in soooo many ways
Gemini will suck I believe when used via certain methods.* Going direct to their most expensive model via API produces competitive results,
but this was NOT the case in 2024.
*Surprising they’re OK with brand/product dilution but I guess the alternative is losing even more money as they burn more energy and tax more servers
Because it’s training on reddit users.
Are you saying that reddit users are the dumbest users out there?
I was implying it yes
Lol nice
Lots of victim-blaming in these comments
Nobody is forcing them to use Google services. And under capitalism voting with our wallets is all we got.
Nobody is forcing them to use Google services.
If you’re a small business with no IT budget, your options are pretty limited.
You can choose from 2 or 3 horrible companies that actually integrate with your stuff out-of-the-box, or you can do a bunch of manual work that none of your competitors are doing.
For a lot of companies, it’s not ignorance or carelessness, but a sober understanding that they’ll have to “render unto Caesar” before they can move on.
Time to cancel then.
Paying for corpotrash.
Good for him. He is paying for evil so he gets what he wanted.
Why do they all act like AI is the holy grail ?? Phone update: here you go, AI. New app: here you go. AI. Websites: here you go. AI.
I’ve tried it, but AI sucks. All tech questions give non-working answers. Everything else, the AI always agree with you.
Because AI is a solution in search of a problem. The current plan is to just put it in everything and hope one of them is better as a result. It’s not the worst plan, because eventually some combination of things is likely to be useful, but it means a lot of useless shit will be slapped together. Of course it’s also far from a great plan, because it means a lot of useless shit will e slapped together.
They’re using us to train it and offloading the costs of training it to us. This isn’t for us or customer service or whatever, they want to use their AIs to further develop them is all
Very Plausible
A buddy works at Microsoft. This is exactly what they’re doing.
They’ve invested way too much to admit it’s almost totally useless, and only useful in niche app, using sketchy conditions (training material IP…) and under tight control.
So they engage into heavy marketing and comms ops to convince the world that “AI” (very vague term BTW, what they offer right now should rather be called systems resulting from stochastic learning, credit for that naming suggestion is not on me) was a revolution and whoever doesn’t get on board will be left behind in the dust.
It worked really well: corporate world is embracing the “AI everywhere” idea.
So now, everyone is competing to provide “the best AI assistant”. And believe it or not: some people do ask for it!
Then cancel I guess.
