Idiots?
I'm not one of them, but what makes them idiots? Seems kind of uncalled for.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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It just wouldn’t be a lemmy post without a smug sense of superiority.
Agreed. I don’t know if this is the term for it, but I’ve been thinking of all this as “signaling disrespect,” a deliberate attempt to make people think of their peers as lesser, as other.
I feel like either people have been conditioned to do this online all the time for some reason, or maybe there’s some directed attack against civility. I don’t know. But I refuse to let myself be affected by it. I won’t hate people.
I suppose you're right, in certain communities.
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I suppose they call them idiots because they trusted microslop's "eternal" definition and even paid for it when there are FOSS alternatives?
A: gets scammed by company
B: You're so stupid, you should have known that company was going to scam you.
As if Microsoft was founded just yesterday and wasn’t scamming everyone at everything for like decades, right?
They don’t have a history of undoing perpetual licenses though. I mean, I know people who still use a licensed copy of office 2000
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I'm not defending this action from Microsoft, but for most people, they buy a Microsoft product and then happily use it for years, none the wiser to any of Microsoft's other nonsense happening in the background.
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And those customers shouldn't have been dressed like that!
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That’s what I’m thinking
I bought the win version, because I have a five year old win 10 computer I’m using until win 10 is no longer supported, and I can’t get office for free anymore.
When win 10 is no longer supported, that’s a Linux computer.
Would I be an idiot, if they cancelled support for mine? I guess so. I’m waiting for some edgelord to tell me I am, probably accompanied by y0u sH00d jUsT g0 LinUx n0w
Yeah, no rush.
Come on over to the Linux side when it suits you. You're welcome to the family when you're ready and that computer is ready. 🤟
Certainly will be, this is definitely the last windows I’m running. Cheers.
It was my sons school computer and it’s running education which for win 10 I have been happy with. One son has ditched win 11 and is running Bazzite now. The other is wound back to win 10 I think, but he’ll move
I’m in the process of deciding which distro to move on; I manage my sons NDIS so that’s front and centre; security of federal government records and claims.
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They probably still came out ahead with 7 years of use without paying subscriptions to Microsoft.
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Not sure why they’re idiots, trying to go the non-sub option is smart, doesn’t vote for subs. Microsoft is the asshole here.
Not sure why OP is sitting here tanking these hits, but I don't think OP meant to call people who bought perpetual licenses to Office idiots. I think they're saying that Microsoft thinks they're idiots. Still, OP should have clarified that or at least answered at least one person who asked.
Because it's a repost.
If you go to the original, OP actually has the top comment explaining exactly that: "idiots" refers to MS treating their customers as such, not a judgement by OP.
Rossman posted a video a while ago about how Microsoft updated their site without noting they updated it to gaslight their customers into thinking it's always said that.
There's a reason these companies are trying to kill the archive sites, it lets people call them on their bullshit.
Edit: YouTube source
I'd argue trying to avoid yet another subscription by paying upfront was an honest and good faith strategy. The problem was assuming Microsoft also acts in good faith, and wouldn't just take the money and run like they have just 7 years in.
Honestly for things like this, I would struggle to be convinced that these folks aren't entirely within their right to take back what they already bought in good faith by pirating it.
After all, perpetual means you bought a license to use that program for life, regardless of whether Microsoft wants to uphold that or not.
Disabled or pirated are not the only options:
Since the OP specifies Mac users, as a Mac user, I find iWork perfectly serviceable. I think it's a bit controversial with its "Ribbon" on the right rather than the top, though it kind of makes sense. I don't love iWork (Writer, Numbers, and Keynote), but they are good and they come with Macs (or at the very least are free in the App Store).
I have tried LibreOffice recently, and I didn't care for it. But I am glad that such a robust free office suite is available on Windows. I believe some Linux distros ship with it, too. If I didn't have iWork, I'd probably just use LibreOffice. It's not terrible, I just have a better choice.
a robust free office suite
The few times I tried using LibreOffice, it's anything but robust. Very bad UX, and even worse, it frequently crashes and fails to recover, resulting in data loss. And I've only been using Linux for more than 10 years now.
The Apple office apps are still free, but they do have an add-on subscription too now.
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Victim-blaming is the real stupidity here. Microsoft harasses its customers (again) and now the customers are the idiots?
This is the same type of propaganda Nvidia is trying to push. Jensen Huang saying "people should have planned better, the rising prices of hardware was imminent" is the exact same tactic of being the cause of the problem and still putting the blame of everyone else.
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Somewhat loaded headline
It can sometimes be annoying when news communities require posts to use an article's original headline, but it definitely makes sense at times.
Like this time
It's an appeal directly to the thriving community of intellectual property pirates here on Lemmy in order to make the post directly to the front page.
Notice that neither of you have refuted the veracity of the headline claim.
You think so? I only see an acurate representation oft reality
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I'm not sure I'm cool with calling people 'idiots' in this scenario. We don't blame the victims of con men when they're stolen from, and this is the same thing, just on a bigger scale.
That said, here is the obligatory linking to LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/
It's free and a better choice.
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Not surprised in the least. It's all about maintaining incoming cash flow.
They cancelled my Win11 (from purchased Win10 eligible upgrade) key earlier this year when I replaced a failed motherboard.
Happy to be free of their ecosystem. Should have jumped free long ago.
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Victim blaming is definitely how you win people to your side... Dumbass
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I was about to purchase some legitimate licenses for MS products when this was first announced.
saved myself the money and trouble and just pirated it.
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classic Micro$lop
Not even worth pirating when there are better open source alternatives.
OOP’s comment on the original post that the cross-poster should have shared:
Disclaimer: I wrote "idiot" to describe someone who paid for the product not because they're actually idiots, but it's because Microsoft is treating them like that: their official solution on the website is "simply subscribe to the latest and greatest or buy a new "perpetual" license to office 2024 to continue using what you paid for"
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This is pretty wild to see. Based on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office
Some people could have purchased this as late as early October 2021.
If companies are going to literally steal things from the user, then why would I buy anything from them in the future?
This is a clear sign to everyone to not buy anything from Microsoft moving forward, because they clearly think they can just take it back at any time.
Microsoft constantly punishes any idiot who ever bought anything from them.
Yet another reason to stick with LibreOffice and other FOSS open source software.
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