Comment by nikcub
16 hours ago
I believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0]
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests...
Is it me or are people too eager to "one track mind" everything into AI? If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft, even in a world without AI.
"literally no one would be surprised" Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility. For the proposition that once you have purchased one of their products, you didn't have to maintain any further relationship with the company. This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.
That’s not how it worked. They were indeed awesome at backwards compatibility, but the proposition was NOT some principled mindset about long term ownership. It was that upgrading wouldn’t break what you have, overcoming a major sales objection. I think the proposition is better understood as one about FORWARDS compatibility — Windows was (and is) a brittle, poorly architected mess, and so the idea that anything built on it would stay working as the platform evolved was clearly insane and developers would never be able to keep up, so Microsoft absorbed much of the cost. This was actually something they did quite well — a good analogy here might be the heroic response the USSR had to the Chernobyl catastrophe, in which they skillfully managed a disaster whose scope was possible only through a long tradition of poor decisions — and this deserves recognition.
But the reason I think it’s better to think of it as forwards compatibility is that Microsoft gleefully used file formats as a means of driving the upgrade treadmill. Yes, the upgrade to Office 97 would keep everything working to approximately the same level of reliability you had already resigned yourself to — but by default, the files it kicked out would be unreadable in Office 95. There was Save As and an optional free converter… which tired 90s office workers didn’t know about, or particularly want to think about. In the age of literal floppy disks, the friction this created was a significant motivator for businesses to say “fuck it, fine.” Microsoft’s true genius has always been in knowing that “fuck it, fine” is the only bar they ever had to clear, and that through the power of lock-in and sheer institutional inertia, they can drive that bar deep into the belly of the Earth.
Thus, Azure.
Lol, Microsoft has always had sunset periods. They just weren’t great at remote licensing. They would have totally disabled old versions if they could much earlier.
Adobe was really the pioneer for that.
Yup. Evil is gonna evil.
I may be forced to use MS at work but at home I dont let their software past my router. A buddy of mine stayed for a few days while his place was being fixed. "Hey, why are my updates not happening?" "Oops, I forgot to tell you that all MS servers are inaccessible via the wifi."
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>This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.
Surely you jest.
US v Microsoft, the antitrust case, was decided in 1998. Microsoft has always been a shitty company run by shitty people doing shitty things.
They enjoyed a brief upwell in public relations during the period when they had first seemingly embraced open source with WSL, GitHub, and maybe dotnet core, but it was merely a blip.
Being overtly anti-consumer is baked into Microsoft's DNA. They'll always return to that baseline.
> Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility
And for reselling you the same office suite every couple of years.
(Full disclosure, I worked there in the 2000s... So if anything I should be biased the other way.)
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>If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft
Ok. Doesnt mean its not because of AI.
Does Anthropic use one or a few licenses to serve all office artifacts?
This is a bizarrely revisionist take. Perhaps you weren't around at the time but that was not standard MO in the slightest. Obviously they were incredibly scummy in other ways, but that was not one of them.
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.
In the mid-90s, when I started my career, I was convinced (and very sad) that Microsoft had won the computing business and I was doomed to work on their software the rest of my life.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
Counterpoint: Bill Gates' appearance in the Simpsons clearly depicts him as a nefarious bully. I think the Windows XP and the Gates Foundation actually resuscitated his image a bit. Windows was a bit hit or miss. Blue Screen of Death plagued Windows 98, Windows ME was a joke, even early XP wasn't great. (I personally wasn't a fan of XP when it came out, switching instead to Windows NT before moving over to Linux c. 2004.)
Bill Gates the ruthless business-nerd was definitely a stereotype 30 years ago, though to your point I don't remember anyone talking about them revoking licenses for purchased software.
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I suppose it depends on what kind of users you have in mind; enthusiasts, versus average users. Before they became outright user-hostile they were known for their anti-competitive behavior and buggy products. People were calling them "Micro$oft" by the 90s, at the latest. And United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation started in '98.
No. It was not normal. I knew people who still had their original office 97 media installing it on windows 10, like a few years ago.
This, I've used old versions that I got as part of a site license for employees deal for years.
I don’t think Office 2019 for Mac is what AI labs would use for this.
I don’t think this is related at all.
Extremely unlikely. Automating Office (the desktop application suite) simply does not scale. It's not needed, either. Libraries exist that can extract information from Office documents (both legacy and OOXML) much faster. Many(!) orders of magnitude faster, in fact.
AI is entirely unrelated. This is simply yet another push to get more SaaS subscribers.
> Windows and Android versions of Office are not affected by the certificate expiry.
That's their problem that they're trying to make my problem.
I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.
These are single-machine licenses. I doubt thousands of agents can run on a single machine.
They can only use it to run a particular tool related to a piece of MSO software. This may be a relatively short operation, a relatively small part of an agent's activity. Then hundreds of agents can use a single machine with MSO, similarly to how hundreds of CI/CD workers can collectively use a single machine dedicated e.g. to providing secrets and signing binaries.
Thousands of agents could remote into one strong enough machine, or even use DCOM.
Unless you snapshot a VM and run clones of it.
How do you define a single machine?
The answer is far more comprehensive than I imagined.
"...run one instance of the software on your device (the licensed device), for use by one person at a time... In this agreement, “device” means a local hardware system (whether physical or virtual) with an internal storage device capable of running the software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a device. For purposes of this agreement, “device” does not include any hardware system (whether physical or virtual) on which the software is installed or accessed solely for remote use over a network.
this license does not give you any right to ... use the software as server software or to operate the device as a server; use the software to offer commercial hosting services; make the software available for simultaneous use by more than one user over a network; install the software on a server for remote access or use over a network; or install the software on a device for use only by remote users
This license allows you to install only one instance of the software for use on one device, whether that device is physical or virtual. If you want to use the software on more than one virtual device, you must obtain a separate license for each instance.
Microsoft may require you to activate the software over the Internet in order for you to use the software. ... The software may periodically and automatically reconnect to the Internet to confirm the license associated with the licensed device. If you do not reconnect your device to the Internet when required as part of the activation or reactivation process, the software may operate with reduced functionality.
We hope we never have a dispute, but if we do, you and we agree to try for 60 days, upon receipt of a Notice of Dispute, to resolve it informally. If we can’t, you and we agree to binding individual arbitration before the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury. ... Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, requests for public injunctions and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed."
https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/docume...
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One OS instance.
...on a Mac?
Yeah that makes no sense. Those AI are not running macOS instances to make you a docx. If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.
> If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.
Isn't this essentially what Claude Cowork is doing? AFAIK, it's running python in a VM and using stuff like xlxswriter, openpyxl, etc. at least it was last time I used it to generate some docs.
I've done that myself too when making some excel reports for management out of pandas data frames.
Microsoft's own different versions of Office can't always reliably read/write docx between them.
Is a layer of LLM going to make this better or worse? Could you train a model to be very good at it?
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