Microsoft blocks editing Office docs on a Mac for university account
I Hate You Microsoft
A university pays Microsoft hundreds of thousands of euros, yet when the author opens a PowerPoint on a Mac, the software says the account does not allow editing. The post calls this unethical, pointing to buried contract terms that push institutions toward Windows, and urges people to stop using Windows and proprietary document formats.
This is disrespectful at best. In reality this is unethical, buried money making schemes buried into the fine lines of some obscure contract that also steers our institution into using windows machines.
- jbeyer
I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 for Mac some years ago. In the last few months, a key certificate expired, and completely bricked the software.
MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license.
This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
- bjt12345
I think one of the more insane things Microsoft have done is their product management of MS Visio.
It became so insanely expensive my work started making us apply for 3 month licenses until we gave up and found something else.
About 15 years ago my Industry was using MS Visio for every diagram.
But they updated the GUI entirely and nobody could be bothered with the new format.
Now people use DrawIO and MS Visio is forgotten.
- vondur
It looks like your license only allows for the web version, so your university probably isn't spending that much for it. You'd get the same message on Windows too.
- throwaway13337
This is cloud-era software philosophy. The device isn't yours. The software isn't yours. You are not a sovereign in your private space.
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Well, Baby steps I guess?
- jadar
First, doesn't Microsoft give away M365 for free to educational institutions? (Perhaps that's only US institutions, though.) Second, isn't this how they bill their accounts — Business Basic doesn't get desktop apps and you need to pay more to use desktop apps? Third, did the OP try to open their document in LibreOffice? I think there's a legitimate criticism of the move from one-time lifetime purchases to the SaaS economy, but Microsoft isn't the only one who deserves criticism for this.