alt Hacker NewsI believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0]
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests...
Replies
I don’t think Office 2019 for Mac is what AI labs would use for this.
I don’t think this is related at all.
> Windows and Android versions of Office are not affected by the certificate expiry.
That's their problem that they're trying to make my problem.
I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.
These are single-machine licenses. I doubt thousands of agents can run on a single machine.
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Is it me or are people too eager to "one track mind" everything into AI? If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft, even in a world without AI.