It depends on what they've purchased. Microsoft's basic licenses haven't gone up by that much in five years. The top tier E5 license was $57 per month in 2020, and today it's $54.75 (albeit without Teams, which costs $8 per month with a phone number attached). European prices are probably a bit different, but the price changes in percentages won't be notably different. Even add-ons like Entra Suite or Intune Suite won't add 72%. It's more likely that they have Azure VMs or other services, and that's where the majority of the cost increase came from. If they're not planning on bringing that on-prem, they'll see some savings, but it may not be all that much.

How many years of electricity bills does it take to reach $120k? For me, it would be about 50 years -- considerably longer than I could reasonably expect the solar power system, and maybe my already-50-year-old house, to last.

You might want more antitrust enforcement and blocked mergers, but it's characteristically dishonest for you to say there have been zero of either.

An apparently human error, not a facial recognition one, unless you would call any other case where a chain sends out a picture of an innocent person and says "do not admit this person" a "facial recognition error".

The criticism is over the qualifier for the word "error", not the label as an error.

... and points out that Vienna has almost laughably mild weather: barely below freezing (-2 C) at its winter lows, and barely above warm (+27 C) for its summer highs. Unless the intention is to relocate all cities to places with such nice climates, it's not a useful "Model for How to Tackle the Both the Climate and Housing Crisis". And rooftop solar is theoretically fine, although usually so expensive as to never recoup its capital costs, in a single-family house with a good battery storage system, but it's not going to do much to reduce power usage in a typical multi-family apartment building.

It's still open; police have only arrested two of the three suspects:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com%2Famp%2FUS%2F...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nydailynews.com%2F20...

Note that the second story makes it clear that this flight was because of gang affiliations, not because of xenophobia. See also https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnypost.com%2F2024%2F12%2F10%2F... .

They can be, but TFS makes a strong suggestion that they are also, metaphorically, tulip bulbs.

My wife is a sign language interpreter, and does a lot of remote work, especially since covid.

To handle a meeting on Teams, sign language interpreters need to pin two video streams - the current speaker, and the deaf client(s).

It is essentially impossible to do this in Teams - they routinely open up a separate Zoom session for interpretation.

You'd think the inability to do this would be an ADA violation...

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.