About three years ago, I had a Macbook and I wanted to play with Flash/Animate again.

I went to Adobe's website, and couldn't find a non-subscription version to just buy, so I actually contacted customer support about it, and they said "nope, you have to pay for a subscription".

I could have of course sailed the high seas, but I opted to just buy a copy of Toonboom Harmony, which is fairly different than Flash but close enough and still offers perpetual licenses (and shockingly works pretty well with Wine/Proton on Linux).

> the last pre-subscription version

Heads up that you can still buy perpetual licenses to Office either directly from Microsoft or through other sellers throughout the internet.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

The pace has probably slowed down, but problem isn't so much that they're not adding anything, it's that the additions are either somewhat niche (e.g., new Excel formulas), don't work as well as they should (e.g., syncing), or are confusing (e.g., the new Outlook that lives alongside "classic" Outlook).

Multiple people being able to edit the same file simultaneously with no or minimal issues is pretty bug, though…

Can confirm as someone who was using pre-subscription Office to write/read files while everyone else at work was using the 365 version. Now that I'm using 365 too, I do however appreciate the ability to do shared live editing in the office programs.

> 2013, the last pre-subscription version

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.

I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.

now I wanna try running office 2013 in wine

running a VM just for occasional office use is annoying to deal with

edit: activation is probs the main issue

There have been huge changes and improvements in Excel

Lambdas, PowerQuery and Python support on Excel aren't in Excel 98.

I don't know, I have been forced to update many times just to use Word. Win7/Word 2003 was working fine for me as a math editor. Somehow everyone changes to .docx, Equation Editor 3.0 was replaced, then one of my major client only accept Word 2019 files for consistency so I was forced to update to Windows 10 just to use that.

And I still haven't seen an increase in productivity. In fact, migration from Equation Editor 3.0 was really painful. I could type math equations blindfolded, I know Ctrl-R for a square root, Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-K A for a right arrow and Ctrl-K I for the infinity. Now I have to use their "new" equation editor with unpredictable behaviour. No hot keys, or useless hotkeys that you basically have to type the entire command to do something you were doing with just two keys. Sometimes the correct maths won't even render unless I press the spacebar a couple of times! It has been a pain in the ass. It took me about 3x keystrokes and 1.5x time to do the same thing that I was doing with the old editors.

Office 2000/XP with the XML based file formats would be perfect.

Is there really any moat around Outlook, though?

This seems to be a sector where Google Workspace (or whatever it's being renamed to next) has made major inroads. It's quite common now for a place to be all-in on Microsoft, using Teams, Excel and even quite sophisticated stuff like PowerQuery, workflows built on Power BI... and then they're using Google Workspace for email and for calendaring.