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Re:Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed ... by misswaterfairy on Saturday May 30, 2026 @11:59PM (#48342917)
Microsoft's key customers aren't consumers, its business and government: specifically enterprise licensing agreements. If Microsoft seriously upset business and governments, they wouldn't be profitable, if in business at all, not long after that.

Because of Microsoft's dominant position considering near ubiquitous penetration of Microsoft Office in government, one part of government will slap Microsoft on the wrist for anti-consumer practices, whilst other parts will still continue to purchase Office (and other products) because there simply isn't another product that competes directly feature-by-feature and compatibility (and usability in part), which matters in (often archaic) government processes.

It would cost far too much money to try to migrate away, at least at this point.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to Euro-Office[1]. If it takes off, it could invigorate other government efforts to fork Euro-Office and replace Microsoft's suite of tools. Someone just needs to put the business case to the relevant federal government stakeholders comparing the cost of (on-going) licensing vs. the cost of building an internal development team to maintain a fork for their whole-of-government machinery.

I'm certainly keen to give Euro-Office a test run, since the code is freely available (on GitHub too, ironically[2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro-Office [2] https://github.com/orgs/Euro-Office/repositories

Re:Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed ... by anticensor on Sunday May 31, 2026 @09:59AM (#48345730)
Microsoft is actually large enough to start their own country. They'd just pull out of all government contracts all at once.
Re:Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed ... by account42 on Monday June 01, 2026 @07:48AM (#48355605)
Since a lot of what Microsoft sells is snake oil, we'll just have the US liberate Microsoftland in that case.