I’ve been trying to de-billionaire my life lately. The strategy at the moment for spending money is:

Buy nothing, if possible. Then buy used, if I have to spend money. If I can’t buy used, then buy local. If I can’t buy local, then buy Canadian or Mexican.

Individuals can do that, and they should if they feel like keeping MS.

Organizations are, unfortunately, probably going to remain stagnant and keep paying millions to for things that have free alternatives.

It’s actually really infuriating. When I was in grad school I filed an information request with the college to see how much they paid for access to Office 365 each year. This was in 2021 and they were paying 4 million a year. Meanwhile their grad student employees were all living deeply below the poverty line.

Individual users can make use of free alternatives pretty easily, but I’m not sure they’re actually the target for the price increase here.

Schools, governments, businesses, and other institutions pay wild amounts to MS every year.

Now that you mention it, I might be a bit off in my math. It’s not my best subject.

Thinking about it a little more, I probably made the account in 2006 or so.

Deleted my FB account just now.

I’d had the thing since 2003. It was the last non-fedi social media I was holding onto (the only way to keep in touch with certain people, and all that.)

This is just Socrates.