There are perfectly good open source solutions for all those things. Admittedly, that is going to take more work than just paying the Redmond tax. But you can’t have digital sovereignty without putting in some effort.
All true, but making 4 other people do this who will also continue to ask on how they can use Office because they need it for work/school is way more work.
That’s a great opportunity to get people to take more responsibility for their own digital life. And I know that’s an uphill battle but it’s also possible to say no.
I don’t disagree agree that that’s technically true. But in practice it’s simply not going to happen. My 70 year old mother just wants to use outlook to mail her friends and I’ve setup het phone to save the pictures she takes of her grandkids (my nieces and nephews) on OneDrive so she can share them easily with the rest of the family. Same thing for my brother and my SiL. For 80 euros a year I get a full groupware experience with no extra work. Is it perfect? Of course not. But even with a higher budget there’s no feature for feature alternative.
Hell, the chances of getting my work to switch to OSS cloud subscriptions is higher than getting my family to do it.
Time for your own Nextcloud instance. I’m really not trying to be dick here (perhaps unsuccessfully? Sorry.) But If I was the tech support for the family it would be my house, my rules.
There are perfectly good open source solutions for all those things. Admittedly, that is going to take more work than just paying the Redmond tax. But you can’t have digital sovereignty without putting in some effort.
All true, but making 4 other people do this who will also continue to ask on how they can use Office because they need it for work/school is way more work.
That’s a great opportunity to get people to take more responsibility for their own digital life. And I know that’s an uphill battle but it’s also possible to say no.
I don’t disagree agree that that’s technically true. But in practice it’s simply not going to happen. My 70 year old mother just wants to use outlook to mail her friends and I’ve setup het phone to save the pictures she takes of her grandkids (my nieces and nephews) on OneDrive so she can share them easily with the rest of the family. Same thing for my brother and my SiL. For 80 euros a year I get a full groupware experience with no extra work. Is it perfect? Of course not. But even with a higher budget there’s no feature for feature alternative.
Hell, the chances of getting my work to switch to OSS cloud subscriptions is higher than getting my family to do it.
Time for your own Nextcloud instance. I’m really not trying to be dick here (perhaps unsuccessfully? Sorry.) But If I was the tech support for the family it would be my house, my rules.