Ms must be getting desperate Free Office/365 trials

Hi folks

Have had a flood of messages from Ms (email etc) begging me to take a "Free Month's trial of Office/365".

I'm happy with the "heavily discounted" version of Office 2019 I have -- seems that their subscription model isn't generating them as much cash as they hoped --I don't like these endless subscription things anyway for all sorts of reasons.

There's a few decent Office clones out there currently -- and if you want a reasonable email client that has IMAP and can access many accounts then - although a pig to set up on a home computer -- is Roundecube which gives a decent professional looking layout akin to outlook -- it runs from a web browser - but without all the rubbish / ads etc with normal types of "web mail things" -- you can use your own ISP email IMAP / SMTP settings too.

I've got it working on Linux - and Kingsoft Office for EXCEL, POWERPOINT, and WORD is very compatible with ms Office products and also works on Linux and Windows too.

It's a real pity but there really aren't many (if any) decent flexible email clients out there currently -- thunderbird was OK but now it's a real pain to get passed the automatic settings so hopeless to configure if you have different imap and smtp passwords, different non standard email servers etc.

Roundcube - is an absolute dog to set up as essentially you are creating your own Email server plus client on your pc so you need to install WAMP / LAMP etc - but if you have the time it's well worth the effort and great learning tool.
I suggest you play around on a VM first - since you might want to make several attempts before you get it right !!!.

Good also if you have kids etc in the house as you can route all their emails through your server rather than let them have their own account from your ISP-- so you can get some method of control -- of course if they have their own 4g/5g phones then that's another matter but they still won't have access to your ISP's email !!.

Even if they send email via gmail the send is still connecting to gmail via your server --rather like an exchange server in a corporate environment - but nothing so complex.

Cheers
jimbo

I'm not sure if they are desperate. Many businesses are on Office 365. Large and small. I love my 365 subscription. The primary draw for me is the OneDrive storage space, for $99 a year 6TB of cloud storage makes the deal a no-brainer for me immediately. The fact that I can install Office on my Mac laptop, my windows desktop, my son's windows desktop, my daughters Mac laptop, my wife's windows laptop is all just a bonus.

My email is all in Gmail, so I don't use a mail client.

This doesn't look too desperate:

Microsoft Q2 2020 earnings: Office, Surface, and cloud lead results - The Verge

Microsoft posted the second quarter of its 2020 financial results today, reporting revenue of $36.9 billion and net income of $11.6 billion. Surface and Office are both up, and revenue from Windows licenses has also increased just as Windows 7 support comes to an end.

Microsoft’s three main business areas are as follows:

• Office, LinkedIn, Dynamics (Productivity and Business Processes) - $11.8 billion, an increase of 17 percent
• Azure, server products, enterprise services (Intelligent Cloud) - $11.9 billion, an increase of 27 percent
• Windows, Surface, Xbox and gaming, Bing ads (More Personal Computing) - $13.2 billion, an increase of 2 percent

The real story of Microsoft’s earnings, as always, is in the company’s Office and cloud businesses. Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 16 percent in the recent quarter, and even Office consumer revenue is up 19 percent with Office 365 consumer subscriptions growing to 37.2 million.