Posted on by wwducat

Well now I’ve got their attention.

Microsoft Word Logo.Microsoft increased their “Personal” subscription price for Office 365 from something like $65 to $99 per year.

I’ll admit that’s not a lot of cash.

The problem is I barely used Microsoft software.

Outlook wasn’t any better than the mail client supplied with MacOS. The Apple email client works instantly and easily across all Apple devices. For its faults, it is reliable and doesn’t require for you put your contacts on Microsoft servers to be blasted across all their properties like LinkedIn and such.

In the entire time I’ve had Microsoft office, I don’t think I ever used PowerPoint for anything personal. I used it at work, but not at home. Excel, got more use, but not enough to justify the cost.

Word was about the only application I used with any frequency. As Word has evolved, it’s become less pleasurable and more annoying to use. So I wasn’t using it as much either. I was using Pages, Ulysses, or Scrivner. The latter two are configured more for writing things like stories. They’re clean and focused on their purpose. 

As I looked at the renewal. I realized it was the same price for 4 applications on a Mac as the price for what? 6 applications on Windows, and that I was really only using 25% of the Mac applications, I decided not to renew.

I made the decision about a month ago. The expiration date came & went. I’ve removed the Microsoft applications from my devices and now, I’m getting email notifications saying my subscription has lapsed and I should re-subscribe immediately to regain the benefits provided by their products.

Nope. Not interested. I’ve got a decent desktop publishing application, and Apple’s Pages for word processing documents. What Word or Pages couldn’t or can’t do, the desktop publisher can. Apple’s Numbers, and Keynote handle spreadsheets and presentations.

I’ve never used Keynote either. Nothing against it, I just don’t do that kind of presentation thing. I could, but why? I’m not presenting anything to anybody these days.

All the Apple apps read Microsoft formatted documents, they can output Microsoft compatible files and PDF documents if I need to share something, and they’re free.

Plus, I just saved 3 GB, (4 GB if you count Outlook which I’d purged a long time ago,) of space on my internal drive.

The Apple products all have the ability to back up versions, and like the Microsoft versions can save their data to cloud based storage. In the case of Microsoft, they insist that you use their cloud and refuse to turn on backups of documents unless the document is saved in their cloud.

Apple products likewise prefer to save their documents in the Apple Cloud which is end to end encrypted, and which through the use of Apple’s AFP system are encrypted in the cloud so that supposedly, even Apple can’t hack them.

I never much liked Microsoft’s cloud solution either and therefore didn’t use it.

This leads me to wonder about maintaining Windows on my Mac. Most of the apps that I routinely use are available on the Mac, so the reason for maintaining VMWare and running Windows is greatly diminished. VMWare having been sold and their subsequent moves regarding VMWare Fusion (the Mac VMWare) also calls into question the necessity to allocate 40GB of disk storage there. I don’t recall the last time I fired up VMWare or the Windows system. It’s Windows 11 which is okay, but there’s not much point in having it, if I’m not going to use it.

Thinking about it, and that my job search is going nowhere, maybe I should just back it up to the NAS and flush it from my Mac. If I need it, I can pull it from the NAS, if I don’t need it, It won’t be taking up space needlessly and I’ll know the answer.

Besides, it might be better to do away with VMWare and instead go to Parallels in the event that I need Windows on the Mac. Perhaps a better solution would be that if due to employment needs, I need a Windows machine, I just buy a cheap assed Windows laptop. Those are a dime a dozen.

This may be a stepping off point from Microsoft for me. They have nothing that I can’t get elsewhere. I have to point out that Pages, opens native Word docs faster than Word does on my Mac. That’s pretty darn interesting.