I Will Not Pay for AI (Premium)

Close your eyes and imagine it's the 1990s. Microsoft has successfully transitioned its growing family of productivity applications--Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on--into a bundle it calls a suite that it sells for less than the cost of buying each separately. That's an obvious strategy, but it only provides value if you need two or more of those products and if the price is right. But that's OK because Microsoft is also improving each at a rapid clip, adding new features--many new features, the Microsoft of this era is obsessed with adding new features--and, crucially, making each app feel less like a standalone thing and more like part of an integrated whole. These, too, represent value, and as the competition mounts, Microsoft pushes down on the pedal, iterating faster and faster, integrating more and more, redesigning these apps not only so they look similar, with nearly identical toolbars and menus, but also work similarly at every level. We have reached peak Office.

OK, you don't need to imagine that, it's what happened. But now imagine an alternate history in which this didn't just continue and lead to Office overtaking Windows as Microsoft's most successful and lucrative product. Imagine instead that Microsoft one day announces something new, a premium add-on to Office that one must buy separately, and at great cost. This add-on, we'll call it Office Sidekick, brings additional features to the apps in the suite, a few here and a few there, features like spell-checking, grammar-checking, and even extensibility through scripting and macros.

Office Sidekick costs three times as much as Office, and while Office had become a no-brainer by this point, an obvious choice, superior to its competition, and a considerable value, Office Sidekick is ... different. Off. It feels like a money grab, a set of features that might have otherwise just been included in Office. Office, a product whose price has been coming down over the years to better compete with the alternatives that have since disappeared, having been destroyed by the successful monster from Redmond.

Office Sidekick isn't a no-brainer. It's anything but. Microsoft's customers see it for what it is and while some corporations pilot it briefly to make sure they're not missing something, most just give up on it. The value isn't there.

This is what Microsoft is doing today, of course, with the modern Office, called Microsoft 365, and with Copilot for Microsoft 365 (and, for individuals, Microsoft Copilot Pro). It's adding features outside the thing you're already paying for, even though the reason you keep paying for it is to get new features over time as part of that monthly cost. It's charging exorbitant prices for those things. And hoping we'll collectively ignore the fact that this type of functionality used to be provided to us as part of the fee we already pay, every single month. Because today's Office isn't a one-and-done purchase--a perpetual license, as Microsoft...