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3 months agoIt still wouldn’t surprise me to see some sort of subscription model being added to Windows 12. Like “disable ads in the UI if you subscribe” or hiding basic apps/features/settings behind a paywall (“watching Netflix on Windows is a Premium feature. Subscribe now!”).
Google may have already disrupted Microsoft’s dominance somewhat. At least here in Finland a lot of businesses prefer to use Google Workspace rather than Office365 - everybody also seem to think that Google’s solution is far superior usability and performance wise compared to the Office and the sluggish mess that is Microsoft Teams. It also doesn’t hurt that Google is also offering free tier Workspace; few of the hobby groups I’m part of have chosen Workspace for file storage, remote meetings etc., without any discussion on what solution to use. It seems as if Google Workspace is now the default solution the same way MS Office was in the early 2000’s. But these are just my observations and are also limited to Finland (and a little bit to Estonia) so the situation and attitudes might be really different elsewhere.
Obviously Google’s Workspace being “free” means you, the user, are the product. But I also think that Google’s Workspace has probably demonstrated to the masses that there are alternatives to MS Office, and that MS Word is not the only text editing software in existence and that you don’t need Excel to work with spreadsheets. Maybe in 5 to 10 years LibreOffice, Euro Office and similar solutions have gained much more ground as people seem to be more aware of FOSS solutions and their benefits in general, especially in Europe where companies and public offices are pulling out from the US tech anyway.