Individuals can do that, and they should if they feel like keeping MS.

Organizations are, unfortunately, probably going to remain stagnant and keep paying millions to for things that have free alternatives.

It’s actually really infuriating. When I was in grad school I filed an information request with the college to see how much they paid for access to Office 365 each year. This was in 2021 and they were paying 4 million a year. Meanwhile their grad student employees were all living deeply below the poverty line.

Individual users can make use of free alternatives pretty easily, but I’m not sure they’re actually the target for the price increase here.

Schools, governments, businesses, and other institutions pay wild amounts to MS every year.

I work in academia. I’m a lowly paid adjunct who teaches 8 classes across 4 schools to make ends meet.

In the lead up to this semester, each school has had a mandatory Zoom meeting to get everyone involved on the same page.

In all 4 instances, I sat there and fucking seethed watching people who make upward of 10 times what I do just endlessly fumble with the technology while saying nothing of value for 2 hours.

It’s honestly amazing just how inept the manager class is.

I’m honestly just deeply interested in this guy every time I hear about him.

Not because I think he’s smart, on to something, or at all worthwhile though.

It’s just…. Kind of morbidly entertaining to watch a man spend so much time and money to deal with an obvious and incredible fear of death.

He’s going to die some day, and probably from one of these things he’s paying for to avoid dying. It’s Qin Shi Huang shit.

And, ya know what? There are some truly wonderful and interesting works of philosophy dealing with his exact problem, but our boy is too much of a tech bro to even consider that someone may have found a way to deal with the fear of death a few thousand years ago.

So, fuck it, burn that cash bud.