If you use Microsoft 365, you may use the Office apps on your desktop devices that are part of the subscription package.
If you do, you may have noticed a new button in the title bar of any Office app that you launch on your device. It says “Upgrade your plan” and has a red dot attached to it to get your attention.
When you click on it, you get an option to upgrade to a new plan that costs more. Microsoft says that this upgrade gives customers “more AI usage and exclusive Copilot features”.
While you can close the window that opened, you may notice that the advertising button remains attached to the title bar. To make matters worse, Microsoft is not giving you any option to hide or remove it, let alone configure that something like it should never be shown again.
Someone at Microsoft must have thought that the upselling in the apps is a great way to increase revenue. The company has probably the numbers to back this up. While you anger some customers, you may get others to upgrade their plan and increase your bottom line in the process.
However, shoving an ad in the face of paying customers may not be the brightest of ideas, at least not this way. Microsoft has displayed ads in various products, including Windows, in the past years. All in an effort to push products, make additional sales or get users to upgrade.
It is probably one of the reasons why Windows has a less than stellar reputation at this point.
The strategy is always the same: add the ad in a location that gets lots of eyes, ignore the voice that questions the idea and also any user comment that is critical of the addition. Then, when things get too heated, remove it and claim that something like this will never happen again.
For anyone fed up with this, LibreOffice, a free and ad-free Office suite, may be a suitable replacement.
Oh, so CEO Nadella is trying to peddle more snake oil? The only reason he has to do that is that he is NOT a visionary, and has no business model to keep Microsoft afloat.
At this time I have very serious reservations about whether he actually completed engineering school in India, and a business program (MBA) in the United States. As I understand it, no one with that level of education makes such dumb decisions.
There needs to be an independent investigation, and a rather penetrating one at that.
You are looking in the wrong place. It used to be that company CEOs relied on customer surveys before making major changes. Now they rely on telemetry only. Telemetry is good at pointing out where the company can win. It is bad at measuring where the company will lose. In other words, telemetry predicts how much a customer will pay but completely ignores how the customer will feel about the product. It destroys “good will” capital that accumulated over decades. Adobe, Google, Meta, and others are doing exactly the same thing. It’s not one CEO problem. It’s the whole tech business sector problem.
This is nothing new. They shove ads in your face right in the OS.
M$ needs to focus on making secure, functional operating systems instead of trying to stick their hands in everyone else’s cookies jars.
LibreOffice is a perfect replacement for the MS Office product. It is completely free. I have been using it for years. If you have not used it try it.
The big differences between the two products are:
1. LibreOffice is 100% free.
2. LibreOffice has no stand alone pieces the entire suite launches at once, then inside the suite you choose what you want to do.
3. LibreOffice has no advertisements in the product.
4. LibreOffice has no telemetry that follows your use of the product.
5. LibreOffice has no forced upgrade, you can upgrade for free if you want the newest vesion. But the version you download will work forever.
6. LibreOffice has a portable version which runs completely from a USB drive, with no installation on the computer.
I hate Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple with a passion and avoid their products as much as possible. My laptopo runs Linux and I hope to fully move my desktop to Linux this year.
I use LibreOffice and avoid Microsoft office.
But some free opensource software organisations do have their bad behavior too.
When you as a consumer, company, government or other organistaion use a important software like a office suite, you expect the data you store using that software is reliably stored, and if a bug cause data corruption that you wil be notified so that you do not lose your valuable data.
Between 2011 and 2018, OpenOffice and LibreOffice had bugs that causes images in writer documents to vanish. On the LibreOffice website, there was never a warning given. You can only find info about the bug in their bugtracker website.
So it took 7 years to fix a bug that cause data loss in OpenOffice and LibreOffice documents, and they did not warn users about it.
I lost data due to these bugs, but I still use LibreOffice because Microsoft Office spying is worse.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I do think Microsoft would have handled such bugs better.