Thank you. This workflow worked for my US account just fine, though my account just said "Subscriptions" rather "Services & Subscriptions".

My plan renewed back in May at the new rate. Microsoft did not advertise that there was any way to remain with the "Classic" plan. I've also never used the Copilot "features". I'd absolutely sign-on to a class action suit to get some money back. Even if it ends up just enriching the attorneys (which class actions inevitably do) Microsoft needs as much "correction" about this behavior as possible.

Yes, it was infuriating.

In addition to the Classic option that is shown only after hitting "Cancel", they also had a secret "Microsoft 365 Basic" option for $20/year. It includes no Office products, but provides 100 GB of OneDrive. Which is all I needed. So Microsoft is getting $20/year from me that they don't deserve.

Why do I pay them even $20/year? It's insurance against the same kind of BS from Google. I back up my Google Drive to OneDrive.

I tried this and the only options I got were CAD 101 for the family subscription with AI and CAD 109 for the Classic one without AI ! ?

Just another heads up - I switched to Family Classic and when it renewed it dropped all access to my family members. I wasn't aware it would do that and had a family member unable to use their "full" email account until I had worked it out and was able to re-link them.

At least they are putting the linkedin product people to good use.

Thanks, just did this on our family plan.

They also added more to the 365 Family Manager family premium plan though -- they ended Copilot Pro as that was an add-on that made no sense when people already had to juggle the other two copilots that are finally "settling in".

Good move there, at least.

> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickdc_copilot-pro-is-no-more...

> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickdc_copilot-pro-is-no-more...

You can thank Friedman for that with the whole "The social responsibility of business is to increase profits" mindset and the Dodge vs. Ford court case that ruled Ford had to operate his company in the interests of its shareholders above all else.

We need to end shareholder primacy and have stronger antitrust enforcement.

If your product is this bad and no one wants to buy it normally, maybe you should build a new product.

I call it Marketing Driven development. Its also responsible for a drop in higher quality software as business people have to justify their jobs and push developers off maintenance tickets that are “low priority” items but still impact enough customers that it should be embarrassing.

Welcome to 2025 - Cyberpunk without the cool aesthetics but all the downsides.

I realised the last time I was in a major city (I live in a village) at night just how close we are, ebikes wizzing around with youngish adults wearing corporate logos all over themselves while using e-cigs, gangs of others waiting outside each restaurant for a pickup.

Straight out the opening of Snowcrash but without the cool car.

We really did invent Torment Nexus from the classic cautionary tale "Don't Create The Torment Nexus".

I love computers, I love programming (and have for 35 years), I really really am coming to detest larger and larger parts of the modern tech scene - consumer tech and the Microsoft/Meta/Googles of the world.

> and have become quite normalised.

Enforcement agencies are asleep at the switch. Without any pressure to constrain them then these major corporations will stop at nothing.

> it should never be a consideration to willingly deceive your customers.

They don't see it that way. They just see it as a new profit stream that they're daring enough to capture.

There aren’t enough opportunities to make the profits they need to keep the stock price up in an ethical manner. So they have to use dark patterns. It will keep getting worse with these trillion dollar behemoths having to maintain their growth rates. Ads everywhere. AI will become more and more of a tool for manipulation.

There's no accountability either on a liability - legal, prison - level or a personal duty to make sure you Do The Right Thing (when, of course, you have a family to feed)

Behavior like what some of the tech giants do (and I don't crusade against "big tech" but individual cases are ridiculous) wouldn't be justified if you, like, wrote it down on a piece of paper and showed it to them, but they get away with it because you can just ignore all feedback, you don't have to actually answer support tickets from a distance of potentially hundreds of miles away (if you acted like that to my face, well, you wouldn't dare)

Some are worse than others; some legitimately just do not care how much evil they're pumping out into the world (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178)

Uber, Airbnb and DoorDash are the primary dark pattern users in the industry.

I am an executive design leader and all hires from these three companies are screened in detail about their honesty level in their designs due to how many issues I have with these companies training their workers to lie.

If you work for them know that it’s a black mark on your record.

I have hired two from these companies who literally opened the interview with “I want to leave X because they literally are lying”

The worst part is it literally costs them the same to tack on AI they are just hiking the price in order to generate more revenue. Running Word locally does not cost them more.

> Family plan went from $99/yr to $129/yr.

How did you find out it was $30 more? Did they email you?

I had to update my credit card details on Dropbox, but the website it so badly designed, I almost just canceled. I'm not sure if its dark patterns or incompetence.

I _suspect_ they switched me from annual billing to monthly while I was updating, but the support chat guy said I was still annual. If it turns out he was wrong, I'm out.

https://www.perspectives.plus/p/microsoft-365-copilot-commer...

Even after putting their thumb on the scale, the numbers are still dismal. Not even a 2% conversion rate.

Rebranding Office as Copilot was an easy, sleazy way to gain millions of locked-in paid subscribers.

I don't know how it was during the dot-com bubble, but the current AI hype is the biggest "Fake it till you make it" operation I've ever seen.

My only worry is about the huge impact on rank and file employees when they issue the "we are re-aligning our strategic direction/priorities and we are focusing on effective resource utilization" pr statement.

Atlassian yanked core Jira Service Manager features into their premium plan which, you guessed it, includes AI.

For our company of >30 people this amounted to a ~$7k/mo increase.

Shhh - We aren't supposed to point out that the 4 Emperors of the Apocalypse are naked.

It's fraud. Plain and simple.

> I was only able to save files to OneDrive and not locally.

I find this very infuriating, and I've stopped using MS for more than 10 years now. They used to be a proper software company, with their flows, of course, but quite professional in the great scheme of things. But what you're describing goes against everything that I've valued as a computer programmer when I entered this field of work ~20 years ago.

The price went up because the seller was willing to bet enough people would keep paying it to more than offset the people who stop paying it. The addition of a feature no one wants is just marketing to make buyers feel better about having less money.

> The $50 million punishment feels so insubstantial

It's potentially quite a bit more. TFA mentions another two penalties: "three times the total benefits that have been obtained and are reasonably attributable" (~2.5 million customers times $40+ for the difference in subscrptions times three is $300 million), or "30 per cent of the corporation’s adjusted turnover during the breach turnover period" if the preceding can't be reasonably calculated (I'm not going to dig through Microsoft's financial statements, but it's probably substantial.) The greatest of three is taken.

If you still think it's pocket change, the point of fines is not to bankrupt the company, but to lead them to less shitty behavior by disincentivizing the alternative. It takes a persistent effort and time.

No expert, but these fines are usually exponential. Usually they start with a slap on the wrist of $100,000s, then climb to the millions.

That the opening figure is so high it's clear that if MS ever do it again the fine will be in the billions.

So you might even say it's actually a moderately strong statement by the Australian government that they're not playing around.

> Microsoft Office used to come bundled with Windows, as an office suite.

Never was. You probably got it installed by friendly it guy or the store was just installing pirated versions.

> Now it's a subscription product.

There is also pay once version. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

> But, $100/year for personal use??

The subscription comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage. Look up how much 1TB of storage costs usually

> What's so great about MS Office that LibreOffice can't do??

Work with spreadsheets more complicated than two cells.

Excel

or cancel your subscription. you would not continue to patronize a restaurant that intentionally put an extra charge on your bill to make themselves more money. why continue to pay M$ after they deliberately tried to trick you to squeeze out more profit?

The ACCC is actually quite switched on to any misleading conduct.

They have gone after Airbnb / Airlines / Hotel Booking / Concert Tickets - for misleading conduct.

Especially business that use drip pricing (adding compulsory hidden fees later) or misleading prices like in the Microsoft case.

Anything sneaky - they're normally right on to it.

Works really well! Switched over to them earlier this year, dropped Microsoft suite entirely, and it works just fine.

works well enough for me!

They have been screwing over their user base for a long time though incrementally.