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Microsoft 365 sees 43% price hike thanks to Copilot — existing customers safe until renewal
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
Just call the sales team and get the classic plan. No more having to deal with Copilot and you get the old price back.
The clippy we all deserved
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn't add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it's almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
To please the shareholders. Then, when AI is no longer deemed valuable and its tremendous costs sink in, they will remove it and layoff the teams that worked on it, to please the shareholders.
But they'll keep the prices high
That's way too simplistic, as often.
For the shareholders, having an investment of several billions turn into an unwanted add-on for a few dollars is not a good thing. It's the opposite, almost like a fire sale.
It's not for you. It's for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
And then what? Also, that won't be legal in the EU.
I mean, you take billions of dollars to develop an AI to put into a product you already have, making it less competitive in the process to ... develop a slightly better AI maybe?
Where exactly is the return on investment here?
Why would this not be legal in EU if the conditions of using the copilot are clearly stated in the agreement? GDPR etc is mostly just that: requirement for clear language + informed consent.
I don't disagree [with your comment (I absolutely disagree with what ms is doing)].
However, like with all technology in the past, where the civilian market received the obsolete military technologies (think, internet, cellphones, gps, and wifi), the consumer facing LLM/AI capabilities are likely nowhere near what the bleeding edge is in the military sector. The consumer facing Copilot is a product to make it "legal enough" to harvest your data, and the EULA people agreed to without reading is the nail on the coffin in that defense. The end product has nothing to do with copilot, office, or even us civilians. We're just the vehicle.
[Edit in brackets]
The AI hardware isn't for us. It's for Google and Microsoft, so they can steal your computer's CPU time and hard drive space so they can build their own personal Skynets. (Same thing with CoPilot, which requires 50gigs of your hard drive space. You're also paying for the privilege of being spied on, which is nice for them, I guess.)
First thing I do with the Google Assistent on Android Phones is to tell it to disable itself. Cool thing is that it does.
You can do that??