Microsoft 365 Personal price hike on renewal!

QrizB

BFBW said:

If you want the latest; https://softwaresupply.net/product/microsoft-office-2024-professional-plus-for-windows-5devices/ £29.99/£24 with promo code.

and

Dicentra said:

You can simply purchase MS office 2024 for less than £19.99 from this site, no annual subscription to worry about. I have used this site and it simply works, just follow the guide. https://ecokeys.co.uk/microsoft-office/

Do note that "Office 2024 Professional Plus" which is being offered by both those sites isn't available for retail sale. It's an Office for Business product, only available on subscription.

What you'll probably get for your money is use of a pre-generated account - with an email address you can't change - with a business or academic institution somewhere. Possibly a real business or college, more likely an imaginary one.

You'll be able to download Office apps and install them and they'll work until your account on that business is terminated. This might be the next day, or could be weeks, months or years in the future.

Full disclosure - I bought one of these "licences" in 2018 and it still works after a fashion today. 

It's "Office 365 A1 Plus for Students", a free academic account that came with the Office apps. Here's a screenshot from my subscriptions page at office.com :

I said it works after a fashion. It originally came with a terabyte of OneDrive space, but Microsoft spotted something fishy and shut that down within a year or two. The email adress is also black-holed; II can't send or receive mail with it. However I can still use the Office apps.

Looking in my account details it appears to be an account with "hk sar baomin inc"; if you Google that phrase you'll find queries like this where people with accounts like mine have wanted to contact the system administrators for some reason (probably because the software has stoped working).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5012326/whos-is-the-admin-for-hk-sar-bomin-inc-company

Or this, where the company name has appeared on their computer:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/175m7m7/what_is_this_search_bar_windows_10/

Or this:

https://thecomputerperson.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/suspiciously-low-cost-office-365-accounts-are-a-bad-idea/

You get the idea.

Note that the account I purchased was provided free by Microsoft to the fake academic institution. The people who set it up then sold a million-plus accounts. If they got £5 each for them, they became multi-millionaires. And so now you understand why they do it!

Is it legitimate and above-board? No. Does it work on the day you buy it? Almost certainly. Will it still be working on a month or a year? Only time will tell.

QrizB

If anyone has bought one of these "licences" recently, I would be interested to know what shows up in their "subscriptions" page and as their "organisation" when logged into office.com.

https://portal.office.com/account?ServiceID=LanguageItem#subscriptions

https://myaccount.microsoft.com/organizations

I cn't believe that hk sar baomin inc can still be selling accounts after all these years!

flaneurs_lobster

Maybe it's time to get a ruling from MSE Management on whether the posting of links to sites offering what I would describe as pirated software should be made a breach of site rules?

The promotion of sites offering (say) stolen or counterfeit goods would not be tolerated, should not the same standards be applied to computer software?

Use of these "second-user" keys is theft. It may be theft from the second-largest corporate entity on the planet but it's still theft.

QrizB

flaneurs_lobster said:

Maybe it's time to get a ruling from MSE Management on whether the posting of links to sites offering what I would describe as pirated software should be made a breach of site rules?

Bsed on this thread and previous ones, I guess that most of the people sharing these links are well-meaning and don't realise the shady nature of these operations. Making it explicitly a breach of the rules would discourage some but would catch out the naive.

Hopefully my post above will be educational

BFBW

QrizB said:

BFBW said:

If you want the latest; https://softwaresupply.net/product/microsoft-office-2024-professional-plus-for-windows-5devices/ £29.99/£24 with promo code.

and

Dicentra said:

You can simply purchase MS office 2024 for less than £19.99 from this site, no annual subscription to worry about. I have used this site and it simply works, just follow the guide. https://ecokeys.co.uk/microsoft-office/

Do note that "Office 2024 Professional Plus" which is being offered by both those sites isn't available for retail sale. It's an Office for Business product, only available on subscription.

What you'll probably get for your money is use of a pre-generated account - with an email address you can't change - with a business or academic institution somewhere. Possibly a real business or college, more likely an imaginary one.

You'll be able to download Office apps and install them and they'll work until your account on that business is terminated. This might be the next day, or could be weeks, months or years in the future.

Full disclosure - I bought one of these "licences" in 2018 and it still works after a fashion today. 

It's "Office 365 A1 Plus for Students", a free academic account that came with the Office apps. Here's a screenshot from my subscriptions page at office.com :

I said it works after a fashion. It originally came with a terabyte of OneDrive space, but Microsoft spotted something fishy and shut that down within a year or two. The email adress is also black-holed; II can't send or receive mail with it. However I can still use the Office apps.

Looking in my account details it appears to be an account with "hk sar baomin inc"; if you Google that phrase you'll find queries like this where people with accounts like mine have wanted to contact the system administrators for some reason (probably because the software has stoped working).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5012326/whos-is-the-admin-for-hk-sar-bomin-inc-company

Or this, where the company name has appeared on their computer:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/175m7m7/what_is_this_search_bar_windows_10/

Or this:

https://thecomputerperson.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/suspiciously-low-cost-office-365-accounts-are-a-bad-idea/

You get the idea.

Note that the account I purchased was provided free by Microsoft to the fake academic institution. The people who set it up then sold a million-plus accounts. If they got £5 each for them, they became multi-millionaires. And so now you understand why they do it!

Is it legitimate and above-board? No. Does it work on the day you buy it? Almost certainly. Will it still be working on a month or a year? Only time will tell.

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

You have gotten your editions mixed up. You might note that I suggested that the OP avoid the cheap versions of Office 365, for that very reason. Professional Plus is not a subscription product. It is a Volume Licence product. Completely different. So your 'pre-generated' supposition is incorrect and the rest of your post is about a completely different product; Office 365. At least useful for anyone considering the cheap versions of Office 365. But not at all relevant for Office Professional Plus.
Professional Plus is the better product for the OP in this case. Likely utilising a VL or MAK key and the Telephone activation method. 

BFBW

flaneurs_lobster said:

Maybe it's time to get a ruling from MSE Management on whether the posting of links to sites offering what I would describe as pirated software should be made a breach of site rules?

The promotion of sites offering (say) stolen or counterfeit goods would not be tolerated, should not the same standards be applied to computer software?

Use of these "second-user" keys is theft. It may be theft from the second-largest corporate entity on the planet but it's still theft.

Can you provide any evidence that "second user" keys are being utilised? Equally, can you demonstrate that anything has been stolen or counterfeited?

I would suggest that you cannot, which is why you are left with simply making overt accusations, without providing even a modicum of proof.

I can explain why your accusations fall at the very first hurdle. OEM licences...They were cheaper than Retail licences, as the Microsoft licencing agreement stated that they should be sold with hardware. At first dealers did just that, sending a piece of junk alongside the COA/Product key. But soon enough, everyone stopped bothering with that. So, technically, those licences were sold outside the licencing agreement and according to your criteria, stolen and counterfeit.
Of course we know that is a nonsense.
Similarly with your claim. Nothing is stolen or counterfeit. It could be that the product does not conform exactly with the licensing agreement. That doesn't make it stolen nor counterfeit. 
If you want to make accusations, you should back them up with proof, rather than just opprobrium.

QrizB

BFBW said:

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
...
Professional Plus is the better product for the OP in this case. Likely utilising a VL or MAK key and the Telephone activation method.

I guess the answer, then, is to buy one, see what you get, how it's licensed, and how long it lasts.

But don't try to convince people that it's legitimate; it's a breach of MS's licence terms, at the very least.

Vitor

These volume keys may be technically genuine, and it may activate, but its resale breaches Microsoft’s civil contract terms rather than criminal law.

In practical terms, the risk to the buyer is simple and boring. Microsoft can and sometimes does revoke misused volume or OEM keys. When that happens, activation breaks and support evaporates. Your £3 bargain turns into an expensive lesson in the difference between “works today” and “licensed”.

J_B

Vitor said:

These volume keys may be technically genuine, and it may activate, but its resale breaches Microsoft’s civil contract terms rather than criminal law.

In practical terms, the risk to the buyer is simple and boring. Microsoft can and sometimes does revoke misused volume or OEM keys. When that happens, activation breaks and support evaporates. Your £3 bargain turns into an expensive lesson in the difference between “works today” and “licensed”.

But surely (if you don't mind me calling you that 😉 ) you could just splash out another £3 if that was your way of doing things?

BFBW

J_B said:

Vitor said:

These volume keys may be technically genuine, and it may activate, but its resale breaches Microsoft’s civil contract terms rather than criminal law.

In practical terms, the risk to the buyer is simple and boring. Microsoft can and sometimes does revoke misused volume or OEM keys. When that happens, activation breaks and support evaporates. Your £3 bargain turns into an expensive lesson in the difference between “works today” and “licensed”.

But surely (if you don't mind me calling you that 😉 ) you could just splash out another £3 if that was your way of doing things?

Some people here don't like it pointed out when they are wrong. I made it clear that the company guarantees to replace the key on the perpetual products, but they choose to ignore that inconvenient truth  So where is the expensive lesson?
With 365, keep a hard copy of everything.