No. I'm visiting Australia right now, and AEST is only 7 AM right now. When this story was posted, it wasn't 2 PM Friday anywhere in the world.

Yep. At list price, an M365 E5 license is $657 per year in the US. For every thousand dollars of lost productivity per person due to the change, they could get 1.5 years of Microsoft licenses at one of the highest tiers.

> Since it is Linux it could be android compatible and capable of running anything an android phone can run

"Could be" is pretty far from "will be," and even further from "is."

> android is 99.9% Linux

Android is based on Linux, and there's a lot of overlap, but it's not as close as you claim. If it were, it would be a lot easier to run Android apps on Linux. As it is, you have to jump through some hoops. Even using tools like Waydroid, you're having someone else jump through those hoops for you, and you're not getting native performance. Taking "Linux" to mean a distribution like Debian, the two environments differ substantially. Even the kernels have diverged in notable ways, though Google still uses the Linux kernel as the upstream source.

Ubuntu tried to make a mobile OS, but eventually dropped it. Pine64 has one, but it's more a hobbyist platform. Purism has PureOS, derived from Debian, but it's market is negligible. It's not easy.

It's not the first time we've seen this idea. The others all failed for a simple reason: no compatibility with the Google or Apple app stores. Without that, it just won't catch on.

> The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can.

Maybe it was that way one time, but most of the major projects that we rely on are written more by professional developers with decent to large paychecks that depend on them writing good software. LibreOffice is not immune from this, with Collabora providing a lot of the development output because their business depends on moving LibreOffice forward.

I think Munich has switched back and forth a few times. They kept finding that FOSS was ultimately more expensive because of training and compatibility issues.

> Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.

Exchange admins are a dying breed because on-prem Exchange is vanishing in favor of M365. Microsoft is slowly making IMAP and POP3 less viable, removing basic authentication a couple of years ago. If your client can't do OAuth 2.0, it can't access M365 over IMAP. It will not be surprising at all to see IMAP and POP3 deprecated entirely in the next few years, requiring all connections to go via API over HTTPS.

> Moving off of MS Word doesn't hurt their budget if you still need a license to MS 365 to get your email.

You can get less expensive licenses that give access to email. The F-series licenses give only web versions of Office access, though Outlook (which comes with Windows now) works just fine.

The reason that we have M365 E5 licenses, though, isn't so much the Office suite. It's everything else that comes with it: OneDrive, SharePoint (which we use almost entirely for file storage, not internal websites), PowerBI, and the security and compliance features. On top of that, we don't have to manage any of the patching or uptime of the services. They (mostly) just work. That Office comes with it is almost a bonus. For a small company, it's a godsend. For a medium-sized company like ours, that's a significant savings, probably several million dollars that would have gone to IT above and beyond what we already spend with Microsoft. Larger enterprises may have a different view, which is why so many are moving back on-prem for some services.

I would love to see some alternatives that could be run on-prem. LibreOffice Online development was stopped five years ago. Collabora Online offers its development edition that can be run locally, but support is limited. Realistically, almost any company is going to use Microsoft, Google, or (distant third?) AWS WorkDocs, and it will be that way unless and until open-source can come up with something that is relatively easy to set up and covers at least what M365 Business Premium or Google Workspaces provides.

The biggest complete failure of a US software project. See here.

1982 - 1994. Twelve years of effort, pure waterfall design/test/implement, everything was believed on schedule until the last minute.

$280 is 35% less than the current price of $430, genius.

That generation of console doesn't have PCIe 5, though -- only PCIe 4. The PS5 uses standard M.2 NVMe drives, but wants them to be high speed (~7 GB/sec). As a result, one can get 4 TB of extra PS5 storage for between $250 and $280; that's a third less than this storage card, and you can use the PS5 drive in a PC if you want.

In the US, I've only ever seen it abbreviated as BS.

I know what really happened: Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket, and refracted light from Venus. It wasn't an alien ship, it was just an all natural flashy thing.

I read just fine. I was responding to a comment that blamed the $150 price difference from the Switch to the Switch 2 on Trump. That comment wasn't taking about some alternative timeline where Nintendo did something it hasn't or tariffs that don't apply did.

The MSRP for the Switch 2 is the same today as when the thing was announced: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomsguide.com%2Fgami...

Sure, just like language fluency should be the least important aspect of reporting, and sewing up a patient should be the least important aspect of surgery. You want to get good at those things because they are still necessary, and because you spend as little time as possible on them while doing them well.

It's also funny to see a coworker's expression the first time they walk up, you turn your head and type another three lines while listening because it takes almost no attention to empty a mental buffer with under 2% error.