Sadly. An example: I work at a small school that does not have an IT department. Staff and teachers are nearly IT-illiterate, and the students can hardly be coaxed to do stuff on a laptop instead of their phones. So installing Linux would add an additional hurdle for both. Probably much smaller than they think, but still: it heightens the threshold to even consider switching to Linux.

There's a few people who know that Linux is just as valid as Windows, but who would they trust to make the switch safely. Me? I'm not a professional. So they'd have to pay someone, properly. And then it all comes down to money again which usually comes down to "let's not change anything".

So for now I'd just be happy if they used LibreOffice instead of MS365.

The same goes for Google Workspace. Making the effort to roll your own (totally possible with FOSS) would require to pay at least 1 person, and some sort of transitional period. It's cheaper and easier to pay none and just blame it on Google when things don't work as desired. These people just don't see it as a priority. Don't understand the dangers.

Especially when you can use literally any other word process and program and save in Microsoft document formats.

They aren't as greedy yet. It will come.

Yeah office isn’t the what orgs care about losing with this change. Business premium was the lowest cost license option available to non-profits that allowed access to identity management using entra.

Sometimes I find myself annoyed by Lemmy users. We love to tout foss alternatives, even when they don't work as well, or aren't nearly as polished.

Libre office is a different story, it has everything you'll need, it's really complete, it does everything you want and it can read any format you throw at it and save its output in any format you need. It launches faster than Microsoft office, it's more stable, I really have absolutely no complaints, everyone should be using it.

And if you need a more MS Office like feel: Use Softmaker.

GNOME Evolution is also a good outlook alternative and am pretty sure it was made as a open source alternative to outlook

And if you need it in a browser, there is Collabora, which exists as a paid business version with support or a free non-support version, that can easily be deployed with Nextcloud. Another alternative would be CryptPad.

If you also need your mails in your browser, there are multiple providers like mailbox.org that offer mail encryption even through the online mail interface.

Unfortunately the inevitable enshitification of our lives by capitalism will continue, even if we remove it from our lives as much as we are able.

What microsoft does to its products, it also does to our governments and civil liberties, social media does to society and democracy, data brokers do to privacy, zillow does to housing security, wallstreet does to economic mobility and financial regulations, etc, etc, etc.

I thought from the headline that it was just a downgrade to Business Standard, no this is to Business Basic! That's a huge yikes, it's so much harder to be productive in those web versions.

I honestly would not be surprised if users work out installing LibreOffice et al. so they can still have a desktop app experience because of this move.