back to article Amazon tweaks its word processor for easier online Office edits

Earlier this week we reported that Amazon Web Services appears to be planning the launch of a new end-user computing service that we speculated could be a competitor for Office 365. And today Amazon has given a hint we might just have been right with news of an update to its US$5/month-with-a-terabyte-of-storage WorkDocs …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

    After doing a routine network security audit I determined that my non-365 version of Office 2016 had installed a Windows Service that was permanently phoning home chatting to numerous M$ servers.

    When I tried to disable this Stasi Service, Office applications such as Excel would then refuse to start up, and there doesn't seem to be anyway around it short of Air-Gapping the host PC.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

      If you haven't quit Office by yet, then you're pretty much not going to. Libre Office has been fine as a replacement for what, 10 years?

      1. AMBxx Silver badge

        Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

        Office 365 has to check that it's still licenced. By allowing you to have multiple installations, there has to be some way for MS to enforce it.

        1. Teiwaz

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          By allowing you to have multiple installations, there has to be some way for MS to enforce it.

          Original OP complained it was 'permanently dialling home', even if it is only a little exaggeration, how paranoid are MS and do they really need 'real-time' response on the matter. Are their lawyers on 'fireman level' readiness to leap into action on a 'bat signal' signal that a customer has fired up one extra copy of Office than they have paid for while those that have no intention of paying are allowed to keep going, as better that than cracking down and forcing them onto other alternatives which potentially weakens theri hegemony.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          Office 365 has to check that it's still licenced.

          Reread the GP - it was very clear that it is normal office. Not 365.

          That defeats the whole purpose of purchasing offline software which is exactly that - to be able to use it offline on machines which may for one or another reason not be allowed to phone home to their software vendors. There are plenty of reasons to have an air-gapped system and there are cases where an air-gapped system may need to work with office documents. People should be allowed to have these reasons and pay for it.

          Further to this, once they have paid for it, they should receive what they paid for - an offline software package. Microsoft has been surfing very "close to the reefs" on this one for a very long time. It is about time someone takes them to court for that.

          1. AMBxx Silver badge

            Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

            Nope, Office 365 also allows on-prem installs. To the end user, there is no difference other than the presence of the Office 365 logo in some of the settings.

            On my E3 licence: From the Office website, you are allowed to install on 5 PCs. If you want to install on a 6th, you have to disable the installation on one of the existing. The dialing home the OP mentions is checking that the PC still has a valid licence.

            I agree that it happens more often than appears necessary, but it doesn't mean it never needs to check.

          2. TheVogon

            Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

            "Reread the GP - it was very clear that it is normal office. Not 365."

            Office 2016 is available in both click to run and MSI installer versions. Click to run is licenced per user (O365), and MSI per device. If he has CTR installed then he IS using Office 365 although is apparently unaware of that.

        3. TheVogon

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          "Office 365 has to check that it's still licenced"

          You can activate Office 2016 / 2019 via KMS though. It doesnt need internet access.

        4. TheVogon

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          "Office 365 has to check that it's still licenced."

          It only does that when you Launch an Office application. For instance a PC might be shared by different users so some might have it as a valid device and some not.

          "By allowing you to have multiple installations, there has to be some way for MS to enforce it."

          If for some reason the 5 device limit is not enough, it's easy to disable:

          Just add a DWORD string value of SharedComputerLicensing with a setting of 1 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration

      2. TheVogon

        Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

        "Libre Office has been fine as a replacement for what, 10 years?"

        Unless of course you need a version on Office that actually works. As per Munich compatibility issues are widespread.

        1. Primus Secundus Tertius

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          Libre Office is a good product in itself. The problems come when you have to repeatedly work with others who use Microsoft Office. I wondered for years how Munich managed that, until the answer came that they failed.

          El Reg should consider writing an article that reviewed compatibility problems between Microsoft Office, Libre Office, Google Docs (and Sheets), and other sundry products. Not just documents but spreadsheets and databases. Even presentations, if people are really interested.

          Also look at integration with OCR software, which seems to be a Microsoft lock-in.

          1. TheVogon

            Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

            "The problems come when you have to repeatedly work with others who use Microsoft Office."

            The problems are also when you need to use any of the vast volume of business software that relies on Office add-ins, behaviour, integration, VBA or macros.

      3. Tchou
        Unhappy

        Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

        In y experience, Libre/Open Offices have been so much riddled with bugs that they are open ads for MS Office. And I don't particularly like MS Office either, but it's a lot more mature.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          "In y experience, Libre/Open Offices have been so much riddled with bugs"

          It's odd that those of us who use LibreOffice as our only office suite don't find that. Perhaps our experience is more extensive than yours.

          1. TheVogon

            Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

            "It's odd that those of us who use LibreOffice as our only office suite don't find that. Perhaps our experience is more extensive than yours."

            If you can get by with Libre Office then you are almost certainly not in an enterprise and likely make only basic use of the product. As is commonly stated on here it's a valid alternative to MS Office, for non power / home users. What it is not is a valid replacement for MS Office in the vast majority of enterprises.

            If you are really a power user and have not experienced any bugs then you are definitely lucky. If you thought MS Office was buggy, just take a look at 7 DAYS! Of Libre Office bug reports:

            https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20creation%5D&chfieldfrom=7d

      4. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          "LibreOffice is crap because undercover M$ employees contributed to it to sabotage it."

          Citation needed.

    2. TheVogon

      Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

      "When I tried to disable this Stasi Service, Office applications such as Excel would then refuse to start up"

      And what would be the name of this mysterious service? Office 2016 certainly doesn't require internet access to work. Smells like bs to me. Otherwise why post AC?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

        @TheVogon

        It's called "Office 2016 Click To Run" service.

        1. TheVogon

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          It's called "Office 2016 Click To Run" service

          So that's simply a streaming installer service. A more modern version of MSIexec. It doesnt collect user telemetry. So comms will likely be related to software updates, licensing, certificates, etc.

        2. TheVogon

          Re: Well I for one shall be ditching MS Office 2016

          "It's called "Office 2016 Click To Run" service."

          Oh and by the way that's only on the O365 (per user) licenced versions. So you don't in fact have "normal" (per device) licenced Office.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Windows

      Aye, right!

      Today, on "Things that never happened!"...

  2. Tchou

    competition..

    .. finally here. Let's see who offer the best service for the best price (instead of who is better at force feeding and locking customers).

    "world most popular format"

    Not quite sure the format itself is very popular, nor would be Office given decent alternatives.

    1. TheVogon

      Re: competition..

      "Not quite sure the format itself is very popular, nor would be Office given decent alternatives."

      Well the last several versions of office have offered a non preselected choice of Open Document and Microsoft formats as the first thing it asks when you first launch the product and over 90% of users choose Microsoft's formats.

  3. AMBxx Silver badge

    Not convinced

    Given that Amazon recently dropped the support for storing your music on their servers as part of prime, I'm not sure I'd trust them with another GB of my data.

    Personally, if I didn't want to use MS, I'd just use dropbox and one of the umpteen freebies out there for editing.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not convinced

      Trust? Dropbox? Really?

      https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/16/dropbox_ftc_not_good_enough/

      https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/24/preserve_enterprise_security_age_of_dropbox/

      https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/24/dropbox_brings_old_files_back_from_dead/

      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-dropbox-privacy-spideroak

      https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/edward-snowden-new-yorker-festival/

  4. ExampleOne

    I'm not sure how "new" this is, I am fairly certain I remember seeing this when going through AWS offerings as part of their partner training 3 years ago.

    In theory, AWS can build a new ecosystem, in practice Excel and all the accounting apps (and others?) built on top of it give MS Office a very strong legacy position many organisations.

  5. Mystic Megabyte
    Stop

    Past its sell by date?

    Pah! When idiots send me a .doc or .docx I use Libre Office to send it back as a .pdf

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Past its sell by date?

      Please don't. I use libreoffice too, but return it in a format that isn't bloated and slow. PDFs break a lot, are ridiculously large for the data stored in them, and usually require far too much software to read.

    2. TheVogon

      Re: Past its sell by date?

      "When idiots send me a .doc or .docx I use Libre Office to send it back as a .pdf"

      So they are idiots for using the worlds most common office document format? Even if say created on Libre Office? And how is sending it back in another proprietary vendor format an improvement?

      Anyway, I guess you are unaware, but Office quite happily opens and converts PDFs back to editable Word documents.

  6. Timmy B

    Seems pricey....

    I currently pay £7.99 for a 5 user license of 365. This includes 1TB per user syncing nicely through onedrive to my NAS for offline backups. This includes full installations of all the Office suite. Something the other half insists on as when she tried the online version she refused to use it as it didn't do half the stuff she needs. The AWS offering seems to do even less.

    No thanks.

    1. AMBxx Silver badge

      Re: Seems pricey....

      It could be an interesting development for light users though. Imagine if Amazon wrapped this into Prime. It's not for me, but I can see my aged parents and in-laws using it.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Seems pricey....

        I can see my aged parents and in-laws using it.

        'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child' Introduce them to LibreOffice instead.

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this so new? I mean: https://www.onlyoffice.com/

  9. Kev99 Silver badge

    Why would anyone with an iota of intelligence want to use an internet based service for document creation and editing? Or are these lazy experts firm in their belief that only the other guy will get hacked, not me. Kind of like the idiots who who shoot horse or sniff a line believing they can handle it.

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