I wonder if this will be a wake up call to Microsoft to maybe allow offline use of things like OneNote. It's really unacceptable to have something that important so reliant on an online service.
(I doubt they'll change their tune. Theee years of complaints about this and they still refuse to allow local notebook storage on Mac, so it seems unlikely that they'd change their minds now.)
What's the alternative? Outlook is an offline app that most employees (technical and non-technical) know well how to use. The only other alternative (for enterprise) seems to be IBM Notes and that one isn't necessarily better (and often less liked by employees in my experience).
Thunderbird has a calendar and to-dos as well (though I never used them personally, so I can't speak to their quality). Does Outlook do any special integration between them (outside of just having them in the same app)?
Yes. It uses SMTP as a messaging channel for calendar invite sharing - sending a meeting invite to someone (through the calendar) sends them an email, which their outlook client picks up and treats as a calendar invite. It also integrates with Active Directory.
Not quite SMTP, but yeah. It's whole normal transport system. Add on to that things like integration with conference call systems (eg: Skype) for meeting and dial-in setup, conference room scheduling (Room Finder), and it's honestly a really nice tool for business use. It does a lot of things that users really like.
Piracy of Microsoft products that allow offline use is rampant, especially in poorer countries. A cloud service is a really good tool to prevent piracy.
Office365 still has a desktop executable, parallel to its online program. It's not all browser-only. I think that's why you two are talking past each other.
They're barely desktop apps - they're essentially bloated javascript heavy web-frame like apps that perform poorly, have many bugs (IMO 7~ years of use) and require login to Office365 / Azure online.
(While this is almost certainly the case for Office, a well-known leader in its category, it should be noted that this logic is not accurate for all products - Increased opportunity cost to the legal consumer and lack of piracy externalities such as network effects mean "always-online" requirements may be detrimental.)
piracy is only an issue if it effects people paying for your product; if they were never going to pay anyway, why not give it away for free? keeping a digital product locked away out of spite is just... spiteful
especially when it comes to poor economies! the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary in some countries! removing the tools that help them to compete with more affluent economies is pretty poor form
> the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary
In poorer economies you can just adjust the price to be comparable to local yearly salaries. It's not that piracy means that end users get the licenses for free any way: there are many people who sell pirated versions of Windows and Office.
> removing the tools that help them to compete
You can be just as competitive with Libreoffice and GNU/Linux as you can be with MS Office and MS Windows. The cime of piracy steals a giant market of hundreds of millions if not billions of people from Libreoffice and GNU/Linux and turns these people into second-class citizens.
For me that is easy. If used for personal use, make it free (and thus, more popular plus free bug reporting for bleeding edge versions). If used for commercial purposes, not free. Then go after businesses that use unlicensed copies of the software.
I can't speak for Microsoft, but I could imagine some type of negotiation on pricing based on several criteria. When businesses purchase licensing for such things, there is always a negotiation phase that starts around 60% discount and goes up or down based on many factors.
Hmmm that sounds like a perfect use case for...maybe those countries, rather than pirating Microsoft's products, use and contribute to open source projects, like libreoffice, and help make it a proper competition for expensive licensed products.
(I doubt they'll change their tune. Theee years of complaints about this and they still refuse to allow local notebook storage on Mac, so it seems unlikely that they'd change their minds now.)