Microsoft Puts Office Online Server On the Chopping Block
- Reference: 0179858734
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/23/1919204/microsoft-puts-office-online-server-on-the-chopping-block
- Source link:
> After this, there won't be any more security fixes, updates, or technical support from Microsoft. "This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions," the company said. Office Online Server provides browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for customers who want to keep things on-prem without having to roll out the full desktop applications. Microsoft's solution is to move to Microsoft 365, its decidedly off-premises version of its applications. The company said it is "focusing its browser-based Office app investments on Office for the Web to deliver secure, collaborative, and feature-rich experiences through Microsoft 365."
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> Other than migrating to another platform when the vendor pulls the plug, affected customers have few options. The announcement will also hit several customers running SharePoint Server SE or Exchange Server SE. While those products remain supported, Office Online Server integration will go away. The company suggested Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as alternatives for viewing and editing documents hosted on those servers.
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> Skype for Business customers will also [2]lose some key features related to PowerPoint. Presenter notes and high-fidelity PowerPoint rendering will go away. In-meeting annotations, which allow meeting participants to write directly to slides without altering the original file, will no longer be available, and embedded video playback will run at lower fidelity. Features like whiteboards, polls, and app sharing shouldn't be affected. Microsoft's solution is a move to Teams, which the company says "offers modern meeting experiences."
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/microsoft_office_online_server/
[2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/skype_for_business_blog/retirement-date-for-office-online-server-oos-has-been-announced/4463229
subscriptions for everything, you will own nothing (Score:2)
You'll be a Microsoft subscription slave for all eternity.
Re: (Score:2)
> You'll be a Microsoft subscription slave for all eternity.
At some point you're just killing your own Excel junkies with supermeth-powered vape hits from the mandatory BigCloudz provider, and Excel is one of the last corporate vestiges.
AWS down for a few hours was quite horrific when measured on every liars tax-deducting financial impact statement. You think that stock market is going to remain standing when one of the members of the Not-So-Magnificent Seven goes offline next time for a week? Take AWS/Microsoft offline for the next month and tell me cloud outages
Remember how Sears used to be a thing? (Score:2)
They were the retail juggernaut. Now they barely exist. They were too big to fail, and yet they did.
Re: Remember how Sears used to be a thing? (Score:2)
Sears did not "fail", they were willfully destroyed by a vulture capitalist.
That's like comparing In-and-Out to McDonald's (Score:3)
> JC Penney isn't doing great these days. Sears would not be much better off. Both of these lost their middle-class customers to other stores and online shopping and their costs are much too high to service low-income customers.
Sears had a different audience than JCPenny. Sears was a beloved tool retailer with a cult following and well regarded for their appliances. JCPenny was a place for cheap clothes that are higher quality than WalMart. To me, that's like comparing In & Out to McDonald's. They have superficial similarities, but one was beloved and the other was "just fine." Sears appealed to dads and was a treat for many working class dads to go to. If they were well run, they'd be vibrant today. JCPenny...their pr
After they had already failed... (Score:2)
Healthy companies aren't acquired by the scrappers.
Re: (Score:2)
Sears used to own a bunch of real estate and a trucking fleet. This let them ship things anywhere in the country in a reasonably timely fashion and keep costs low on both ends. They did absolutely, pathetically flub web sales, but it really wasn't too late to fix that. They at least had done the work of getting the product information digitized, even if the web site was otherwise a loss. (It really was terrible, and so were the prices, wtf.)
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> They were the retail juggernaut. Now they barely exist. They were too big to fail, and yet they did.
Meh, bad timing was their only fault.
They were actually Too Big To Fail at some point. Society wasn't quite corrupt enough to support the kind of financial fuckery that keeps companies like GM in business today, while allowing companies like Sears to fall over and die.
Some customers may be in a legal bind (Score:2)
Some customers may not be able to move their data off-prem without violating existing contracts or the law.
I guess they will have to go with Office 2024 LTSC or go non-Microsoft. Even that will go unsupported in 2029.
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"I guess they will have to go with Office 2024 LTSC or go non-Microsoft" or they can just ignore the issue and blissfully send their money to Microsoft.
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> "I guess they will have to go with Office 2024 LTSC or go non-Microsoft" or they can just ignore the issue and blissfully send their money to Microsoft.
In some parts of Europe, that would mean executives getting punished personally if caught.
Nadella is missing the mark here (Score:3)
I think it's time Microsoft replaces Nadella. He's failing in the same way that Ballmer failed, which is suffering from extreme FOMO on literally any and every new hype coming out while ignoring the rug pulling that's slowly gaining steam beneath him.
Open source solutions for most things have surpassed Microsoft's Windows Server platform to the point that Windows Server is effectively dead except in very specific circumstances. Over the next decade that will continue to grow to be a thing, and further financial investment in open source platforms will eventually catch up to cloud products as over time people and companies continue to invest in developing on-premises solutions to replace the ones Microsoft is ignoring.
We are starting to see the cracks in cloud compute. On-premises compute support is growing again as companies realize it's actually cheaper to run all of this random bullshit on some shared hardware than to spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on cloud compute spend.
Sovereign clouds are growing and becoming more of a thing. And the day that Microsoft, AWS, or Google is forced by the United States government to turn over information in a European cloud to the US government will spell the end for massive generalized cloud computing. These major cloud vendors ignored the fact that they've been riding the coattails of trust the world has had in the United States government to trend towards more progress and freedom. And that's clearly not going to be the case anymore.
Broadcom's push to basically force everyone off of VMWare is massively modernizing software which companies still want to run on-premises but moving them all to bare metal k8s nodes. Reducing VMWare licensing will have a direct impact on how many Windows servers exist across the world.
Nadella has put next to no investment in Windows except for chasing AI bullshit. Which itself is already showing cracks with Meta's recent layoffs in AI.
All of this focus on AI and Cloud, both of which are going to be massively reduced over the next 10 years, along with modernizing software to run in containers and getting away from traditional VMs driven by Broadcom's licensing onsense, will make Microsoft virtually irrelevant as soon as someone releases a comparable Office and Exchange stack you can run on-prem again.
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As someone that's creating yet another linux VM at an "all Windows" shop that also prefers to buy macbooks rather than Windows 11 devices because they have fewer weird problems, Microsoft is screwed. The big sell of Windows was you had some level of centralized management built-in if you were in a domain environment. Was it perfect? No. Did it solve all problems? Not even close, but it got you half way.
The cloud-first and now cloud-only yet-another-subscription approach has diluted Microsoft's position. If
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Indeed. Although that "Office stack" already exists (LibreOffice) and who needs Exchange to begin with?
At the moment all that is keeping MS alive is momentum. But their usability and security are getting worse and, at least in Europe, o365 is actually not legal to use for privacy-relevant data in many cases. The legal system has just not yet caught up with many of these uses.
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I don't know that MS has been caught doing data transfers specifically(though they'd have to screw it up or have it leaked at a fairly high level to get caught; 'cloud' is basically always opaque on the back end as far as the customer can see); but there have been a couple of instances recently of service getting cancelled. When Trump got into a snit with the ICC [1]cut their chief prosecutor off [politico.eu](Brad Smith mollified more or less nobody with the claim that they didn't cancel service to the ICC , just to the sen
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/
Translation service (Score:3)
"This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions,"
Translation:
"This change is part of our ongoing commitment to ensuring everybody is paying us a monthly subscription fee."
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That's only the first part of the grab.
"This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing recurring revenue and feeding every document we can find to the robots"
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Yep. And anybody is fucked if their servers go down or their cloud gets hacked again.
Typewriters and adding machines that's the future! (Score:1)
Save the electricity for the mimeograph machine
Or maybe we can just port DOS and WordPerfect 5 over to ARM or something
*sigh* It's so easy to fleece people, rich and poor alike. When the power goes out, we're gonna be in a big heap of trouble
This will be interesting (Score:2)
I know of one pretty large bank that cannot move to o365, because that would be illegal. (Data has to stay under their control....)
Maybe they will go LibreOffice, nothing really to prevent them from that.
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They're not forced to move to Microsoft 365 as I'm guessing that they won't have deployed Office Online Server anyway, they will have the native desktop apps installed instead.
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Last I knew they were moving to all web-apps with web-terminals for everybody.
Too Much Privacy (Score:2)
Microsoft cannot abide the idea of any person -- or, apparently, any company -- actually running things that Microsoft is unable to snoop into. They demand full access to everything in exchange for using their software.
Sure MS missed the news (Score:2)
Or the West Coast cares less about what happens on East Coast of the USoA. How bad things can be when everything runs at their own computers instead of the end user computer?