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As ‘Buy Canadian’ grows, more US companies say retailers turning away their products
(www.reuters.com)
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Microsoft is currently robbing Canadians.
Every year, they are overcharging the Federal Government, Provinces, Cities, Universities, Hospitals and Small Business owners for the right to use Microsoft Office. They make 40% margins. It's absolutely disgusting.
Microsoft has basically managed to tax every single Canadian.
If you go to a Canadian University, whether you like it or not, you are paying the Microsoft tax. Because your tuition is paying Microsoft. If you pay provincial taxes, you pay the Microsoft Tax. Whether you like it or not, the provinces are paying Microsoft. If you go buy food at the supermarket, whether you like it or not, you are paying the Microsoft tax. Because Canadian supermarket companies are paying Microsoft. You want to buy a bus ticket ? You are paying Microsoft. The Bus company is paying Microsoft.
It's parasitism. Microsoft is a parasite that feeds on the Canadian economy.
I now use Libre Office.
👉 https://www.libreoffice.org/
It's a wonderful alternative to Microsoft Office. It's free, secure, and developed by a non-profit organization that I financially support. I urge people to switch to Libre Office instead of Word/Excel/PowerPoint.
After a few days, you quickly get used to it. Then you just wonder "Why we are all paying Microsoft so much money in the first place?".
We need Canadian institutions, small and big, to do the same. Stop paying the Microsoft tax. Fight the Parasite.
I'm going to take a slightly more nuanced take on this as someone who works in the enterprise software ecosystem.
Microsoft doesn't just sell office to the government or university anymore. Their Microsoft 365 subscriptions include e-mail, office, intranets, communications, security, collaboration tools, and even more.
You can replace the office part with Libre Office no issues, and for home use I would absolutely recommend that instead of paying for a Microsoft license, but the moment you need to start building your own e-mail servers, file sharing systems, getting software for messaging and video calls, etc. the price (software, hardware, maintenance, tech support) goes up to well above what Microsoft charges.
Unfortunately, Microsoft provides decent value.
I'd love to see a non-American competitor that offers such a comprehensive business package, but there isn't even a realistic American competitor at this point, Google is the closest with Google Docs/Sheets, Gmail, Google Meet, Google Drive but having used it extensively it's still falls short of what Microsoft is doing and of course it's also American.
If you need to sign up to 6 different companies to get the same functionality coverage it's never going to be as integrated, as easy to use, or as cheap.
Many of the things you listed are available as free software through opensource projects. Microsoft just bundles it all making it easy.
And runs the server required stuff on their own hardware.
I mentioned this in my comment.
Which is cheap. You can run a lot on a pi these days. Or setup a higher powered nuc. MS chargers for server and now named user licenses.
You can not run enterprise business functions on a pi unless your "enterprise" is made up of a single user.
Even something like basic video steaming for internal training videos would kill it due to encoding issues. Let alone the impact from one service affecting others like a user file transfer affecting the speed of messaging or email, or a complex database activity momentarily taking out your task management application.
You would need a dozen of them for splitting services and redundancy, then a UPS and redundant internet connections. It would end up costing you a few thousand dollars just in hardware before you even started paying someone to set it up and keep it running.
We selfhost a lot for work. Was paid services before but cost kept creeping up. Companies have IT anyway, so it is really not a huge expense to manage your own services.