Back in January I wrote about how Microsoft had increased their Office subscription prices by a third, but you could still get it for the old price by saying that you wanted to cancel, and then selecting the ‘Microsoft 365 Family Classic’, which comes without all of the AI features that lead to the extra cost.
Well, our subscription just came up for renewal… and I found that they’ve now removed that option from the website. In fact, there’s nothing on the website to suggest that writing a letter without the aid of AI is something you might want to do… or appreciating that you might not want to pay for it.
Undeterred, though, I used the online chat system. It was AI, of course, but, to be fair, I was able to get through to a human pretty quickly. She had some standard auto-generated responses about all the wonderful things AI could do for me, and a set of questions she needed to ask me about why I didn’t want AI to improve my productivity in my Office suite. I said, roughly:
- (a) It costs money.
- (b) I’m concerned about the environmental impact.
- (c) Im concerned about the privacy implications.
- (d) I’ve used the the tools, and know that the supposed productivity improvements are mostly a myth unless you’re writing stuff that nobody would want to read… in which case, why bother?
- (e) We went to school, so we already know how to write.
I could have added that:
- (f) I almost never use Microsoft Office, so wouldn’t look there for any of this stuff anyway, and
- (g) Modern Microsoft apps are quite bloated enough without wanting to add anything more, and
- (h) The only things I might want to use AI for I can get for free from chat.bing.com or chatgpt.com or aistudio.google.com or claude.ai, so I’d rather spend my 25 quid on fish and chips and beer at a nice waterside pub, thank you very much.
But even without those additions, in the end she admitted that she could actually renew my Microsoft 365 Family Classic subscription for the old price.
So it’s still possible, if you can manage to talk to a human. But I wonder for how much longer…
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