The price is high: here in Canada it's $30 per user per month on top of $9.99 per month for Microsoft 365 Family. For a family of 4 that's $147 per month with tax included, or $1740 per year if you pay the annual rate for MS 365. I can't imagine too many people will jump on that.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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I forgot people are paying for msft 365. 10$ per month is kinda crazy for software I use maybe occasionally (considering most of the functionality is already available with Google Docs, and OpenOffice gets the job done for offline usage).
Honestly the only reason I’d pay for O365 is for the included Cloud storage. A yearly family plan is $99.99, and includes up to 6TB of one drive storage, which isn’t a bad deal for Cloud storage if you need it.
Hell yeah brother me too.
As an added bonus, I no longer have to crack Office for my family. And my sister doesn't panic when her phone dies anymore.
Also worth noting they're one of the very few cloud providers I'm aware of with regional pricing, the annual family plan's bang for your buck is simply unbeatable where I live. Not an apples to apples comparison but to put it into perspective, my 1TB Hetzner storage box runs me about the same as my 365 family plan, except the latter has 6 times the raw storage among all people.
It's really just businesses and people who use Office a LOT. Pretty much my entire job is used in MS Office.
Do you use the cloud version?
Both. We have installed programs as well as OneDrive and cloud versions that can open documents on the cloud.
Interesting. I've used the office cloud and found it less pleasant than the desktop version. I guess for certain use cases (multiple people working on the same doc) it's better.
Oh yeah, it isn't as good as the application. It's slow and cumbersome and has trouble with larger data sets. It IS nice for editing in tandem and quickly viewing a file without having to open the whole program. But for any real work I do I open in desktop.
The cloud storage is a pretty good value when you use the family plan as others have said. But having collaborative editing support with the full functionality of Office is very useful. I'm aware that GDocs can do it but if you're regularly writing documents, Office has a much more intuitive interface and more advanced features that I can be very useful.
The bundled 60 international Skype minutes are also very useful when planning trips overseas.
$30/mo/user? Wtf? What are people even using Copilot for? Every single time I've tried an AI language model it gives me laughably wrong and bad answers. I would need it to be 99%+ accurate to bother trusting it; especially when just searching an answer and finding a decent source isn't that lengthy.
Business users are the target group. If your job needs you to reply to a lot of mails and the Myomen you press the reply button AI creates an answer for you, you only need to edit in some details, the time safed will probably be worth more than 30$ a month.
Other use cases are internal communications. I know intranet software where you just promt a topic, a tone and what department you like from and it will create a news for you. Again not perfect, but safes you from staring at a blank page.
I can hear the HR, PR and security teams screaming from here just at that idea.
At best this would evolve into smart templates. But we can do that now. And we don't actually need that since the few emails we send that are repetitive we just grab from our drafts/sent folder.
I have been using Phind for debug and Perplexity for asking questions. Takes time to use two at once but it does the job.
I've seen estimates that it costs $30+ dollars per month per user to run these AI models. And that doesn't even include how expensive it is to build and train these systems. I imagine this is what will ruin the appeal of AI for a lot of people, as right now we're in the honeymoon phase where a bunch of it is free or low cost but as they raise prices it'll get less appealing.
Nobody will want to pay, so the end result will be ads interspersed with the output.
Just kidding, they will include ads even if everyone chose to pay.
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Maybe I'm the only one but I've yet to find anything that Copilot is good enough at to make me want to pay $20 a month.
Copilot with gpt4 on the copilot bing app is so crap if you ask if it is copilot or using gpt4 it sill straight up tell you it is not and its just bing in chatmode which it considers seperate from the copilot chat Feature.
You're not the only one.
Codename "clippie". LOL 😆😂.
Idiot magnet deployed, sir!
hold with unit thinkpad.
edit: that is now Microsoft hearing in to enemy communications
I've been using heygpt.chat to interact with GPT 4. Chats are stored locally (front-end sends requests directly to openAI, no servers in the middle) and I've never spent more than $4 in a month, usually under $2 if you're careful to not make long chats ,which context grows geometrically. If you make occasional use of GPT and don't mind lacking the integrations into other services, I'd recommend it. Much cheaper than the usual $20/mo fee to access GPT 4.
Can this do web searches though?
yes, via plugins. I've only used it once or twice though
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft evidently envisions Copilot, the umbrella brand for its portfolio of AI-powered, content-generating technologies, becoming a significant future revenue line-item.
But given the enormous cost of running GenAI models in the cloud, getting Copilot from expenditure to reliable revenue generator will require sustained — and large-scale, ideally — growth.
And they have priority access to the newest GenAI models underpinning Copilot, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, for what Microsoft claims is better performance during peak times.
Unveiled in November, Copilot Studio lets users build their own chatbots and plugins and conduct fine-tuning with first-party company data.
Microsoft’s attention might be turning toward paid Copilot plans, but the company’s not completely neglecting free users.
In the first half of 2024, Copilot will expand to Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.
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