Microsoft Says Price Increases Coming For Office 2019 and Windows 10 Enterprise Users (zdnet.com) 136
Microsoft has price increases in store for some of its Office and Windows customers as of October 1, 2018. From a report: In a July 25 blog post, Microsoft officials acknowledged the coming increases. Office 2019, the next on-premises version of Office clients and servers which Microsoft is currently testing ahead of its launch later this year, will see increases of 10 percent over current on-premises pricing. This price increase is for commercial (business) customers) and will affect Office client, Enterprise Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL and server products, officials said.
Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.
Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.
Microsoft is a monopoly (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft can do this because they're a monopoly, which by definition has no serious competition. Sorry, but Linux just isn't up to the task of meeting the needs of most users.
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And your explanation of why?
Re: Microsoft is a monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
Libreoffice is actually a perfectly good Office tool. It just doesn't have the thousand bells and whistles that most people don't use. Oh, and it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Oh and its ethical. Several goods there and quite enough for me (alt-tab back to Lbreoffice).
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It just doesn't have the thousand bells and whistles that most people don't use.
The I don't use it/see the need for it, blind spot. Its also an aspirational thing. I don't need all the bells and whistles now, but they are there if I need them. I may use them some day! (but then never do.)
This is a thing apple keeps getting up against I think. For instance, I'm fairly confident their data indicated a vast majority of users only have one usb device plugged in at a time (or none), so decide one is eno
What a logic! (Score:1)
Businesses DO save a lot by using LibreOffice.
But most businesses are led by PHBs who like what they are used to, and defend it precisely because they are as clueless as they are pussies. And then there is the MS fearmongering targeted at them every time they renew contracts or open their news sites. Resulting in very sluggish changes. But they do happen, as can be seen in the dominance of Linux on servers.
There have not been any meaningful new features in these office suites for a loong time. Most of them
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Libreoffice is actually a perfectly good Office tool.
If that was even remotely true, businesses would save themselves millions of dollars and switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.
Ah, the "Businessmen are all-seeing, rational, geniuses" fallacy.
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I don't really see much of a niche for Libre Office over Google Sheets in the real world.
Mostly because it struggles to open Excel documents though (2 line cells get broken characters is the most frequent issue I have.
It also does a weird thing where the cell that I'm editing appears above the cell I'm actually editing sometimes (last used about 18 months ago, it was hardly a new project).
I'm sure that their are people that want to work on sheets bigger than what's convenient on Google Sheets and don't need
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Libreoffice is actually a perfectly good Office tool. It just doesn't have the thousand bells and whistles that most people don't use. Oh, and it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Oh and its ethical. Several goods there and quite enough for me (alt-tab back to Lbreoffice).
Ordinarily, I'd say this...
Libreoffice's biggest issue is formatting. Not only can it fail to read Office formatting properly (to be fair, this is probably by Microsoft's design) but importing blank text and adding formatting results in disastrous and inconsistent results. 95% of people can do without the bells and whistles, but not the formatting that Office gets right.
And I'd love to dump MS office, so much so that it's only installed on one of my computers, the rest have Libreoffice but when writin
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How is Kickstarter or Libre bad?
The former is just a way to get a project funded without having to go through the big established gatekeepers. The latter is a perfectly good office suite that deserves support.
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It's been tried before and failed.
The basic problem Linux faces is not really the OS or even Office, but compatibility with other legacy windows programs. Nobody really cares what OS is under the GUI, Linux Office Suits are fully functional but different from M$oft's offerings and if you want/need to run something else, it's a crap shoot with WINE and it's derivatives.
What we actually need is a fully functional Windows environment to run windows programs on Lunix that is 1. easy to configure, 2. Seamless
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We need to create an AI that will do it for us!
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a drop in replacement for Office that can read all the current document formats
Why? By many accounts here (though I've never seen an example) MS Office isn't even compatible with other versions of MS Office so really any inertia related to format lock-in is lost every version anyway, there should be nothing stopping people switching to LibreOffice aside from features...well and of course that Office365 is available on all major platforms via either native applications or the web version, LibreOffice is a long way behind in that regard.
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Why?
Because....If you cannot say you can at least read every nearly M$ Office document out there, your "office replacement" is a non-starter. Trust me.
Also, Even if Office doesn't meet the above requirement, you can bet that M$ will crank up the FUD campaign to beat you down and protect it's market share.
By the way... Just in case you wondered.... I actually LIKE the non-M$ Office offerings better than Office. I find them to be better designed, less cluttered and easier to figure out. The problem is, m
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Also, Even if Office doesn't meet the above requirement, you can bet that M$ will crank up the FUD campaign to beat you down and protect it's market share.
Where has this happened wrt OpenOffice, LibreOffice, iLife, Google Docs, etc... I'm quite sure all of these provide some competition so where is the MS FUD campaign against them?
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It's been tried before and failed.
The basic problem Linux faces is not really the OS or even Office, but compatibility with other legacy windows programs.
The problem exists with Windows and other Microsoft-ware too. I have some data I archived with some MS archive software some years ago. I no longer have the archive software and I can find nothing that will extract it today. You would think that of all things MS would have kept the provision to extract archives made with their own software no matter how long ago.
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It seems to me that blaming Microsoft for this is a bit wrong. You made the archives, but didn't maintain the ability to retrieve from them. Sorta like losing the key to your shed....
I have an old XP laptop laying around, fully functional, in order to handle legacy situations. I also have routinely gone though my "backup" material and refreshed it to new media or knowingly destroyed it because it wasn't worth keeping (like my old BBS from 1989 on 1.44Meg floppies). So over the years my data archives hav
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there are solutions with less soy.
https://www.libreoffice.org/do... [libreoffice.org]
you can always donate to libreoffice, without gathering money somewhere else and paying loyalties to a third party.
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So they shouldnt be allowed to increases prices periodically?
Yes the new period is monthly/yearly because monopoly.
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Well... they can always use Ubuntu with LibreOffice instead, which is free... ...although you'll probably find yourself spending so much time cleaning up your documents after converting to from .docx and .xlsx format to .odf's that you'll wish that you just paid the damn license fee. Been there, done that.
metanalysis (Score:2)
One necdote doesn't make a spring, but personally I've spent less time on that from OO/libre to Office (and back again) than I have between different versions of the latter.
Windows 7 not haveing SP3 lead to long updates (Score:2)
Windows 7 not having SP3 lead to long updates times.
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Windows 7 is the Best Windows.
2000 was a good deal saner, other than certain security improvements. But, as we know, each other version of Windows is passable: 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, ..., 10. Yes, the lack of Windows 9 is not an accident.
Massive adoption of features we're used to for 30 years on POSIX systems gives quite a bit of hope. All that WSL, virtual desktops, curl, tar, sane terminal, ssh, AF_UNIX sockets, etc suggest it's possible that like they switched from DOS to NT, there might be a kernel switch to Linux soon. So W
Re: micro$oft lol classic (Score:1)
I disagree. The best windows was win2k.
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Microsoft is pushing out new versions because no one has gone for their subscriptions so new versions is how they make money. That is all.
Except that's not actually true. And it's the number one thing that makes no sense about Windows 10.
Microsoft makes nearly all of its Windows revenue from OEMs who install it on the computers they sell. With ~90% desktop market share, Microsoft is guaranteed to sell ~200 million copies of Windows every year. If Microsoft never released a new version of Windows and just kept patching/updating Windows 7, OEMs would still keep selling computers, and there would still be a demand for ~200 million copies of W
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Microsoft is pushing out new versions because no one has gone for their subscriptions so new versions is how they make money.
Except that's not actually true. And it's the number one thing that makes no sense about Windows 10.
Microsoft makes nearly all of its Windows revenue from OEMs who install it on the computers they sell.... If Microsoft never released a new version of Windows and just kept patching/updating Windows 7, OEMs would still keep selling computers, and there would still be a demand for ~200 million copies of Windows every year.
Why no sense? - because that is exactly what they are doing, but with Windows 10. MS have said they are never going to release a new version of Win10, just [forced] "updates". And they will increasingly push for users to rent Win10 too, as it gives them a steady income (which accountants love). They will probably do this by making the "updates" on non-rental copies inferior to those for rented copies - perhaps basic security only, and on new PCs the rental will kick in after the first month or you will get
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Prediction: Windows 10 start menu tiles will soon become little TV screens of ADs!
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It depends on what you need though. I need support for wide-gamut displays and 32-bit colour which I could never get working properly with Win7, but works fine out-of-the-box with Win10. Also, newer power management features like S0ix states are not supported by Win7, and poorly supported by Win8. Win10 will give a significant battery life improvement on newer notebooks. I agree there's a lot that sucks about Win10, but there are many new features that are actually useful.
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7's UI is like a dumbed down version of XP. There are add-ons to make it tolerable, but without them it's shite.
Office 365 (Score:4)
Funny. I don't see them jacking up the cost of the subscription service. Its still a good deal but I'm not to happy with them trying to force it on people.
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Funny. I don't see them jacking up the cost of the subscription service.
Yet.
The 'subscription' version has already shown itself to be a price increase over the old version:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Microsoft can never have a bad quarter any more. Need to meet sales projections? Just crank the subscription dial up a bit...
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That's because you used to be able to get up to a decade out of an Office install and could install one copy on multiple computers. Now a decade of Office costs $1,000. You used to be able to save money if you didn't always need the latest and greatest, but Microsoft squashed that bug.
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That's because you used to be able to get up to a decade out of an Office install and could install one copy on multiple computers. Now a decade of Office costs $1,000. You used to be able to save money if you didn't always need the latest and greatest, but Microsoft squashed that bug.
At home, I still use Microsoft Office 2003.
Why?
Back when it was new, it did everything I need and I frequently used Word to create complex 100+ page documents. So what has changed since then? It still does everything I need and I can still create complex 100+ page documents, **AND**, nobody has invented any new word processing functions that I need.
And, sadly, my 15 year old copy of Word is still better than any brand new version of Open/Libre Office.
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Trump to hang for treason.
Just give the whining, it's become boring. You lost.
I would be careful Microsoft. (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows isn't as dependent to the institutions as they use to be.
Except for Windows Clients, you can have iOS, Andoid, ChromeOS, Linux, OS X as well that will just Citrix into that App or more often then not the applications are web based so you don't need windows for as much stuff.
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I understand that a research paper needs some margin to write notes.
But they have their heads so far up their asses that you'd think they spend more time measuring the margins than reviewing the actual content of the research paper.
I work at a fortune 50
Re:I would be careful Microsoft. (Score:5, Interesting)
File formats aren't the lockin, it's the ecosystem of plugins around Office that keeps it firmly entrenched. I've yet to work in a vertical where a company larger than say 50 employees doesn't have a few plugins that are developed for their industry that hook into Word or Excel or Outlook that are considered essential for users workflows. My current vertical is law and we have nearly a dozen for both Word and Outlook.
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Is it good enough?
Being that most of the work is done on the server, the important processing is done there much more efficient.
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I don't follow your logic.
Why would a Form Based Application be superior to a Web Form based web app?
The current stuff that isn't "web-alized" is stuff that requires a lot of graphics (CAD, Games, Graphics Designing) for retail (high volume) Web is actually a better fit, because you need servers with data integration, so you have a high end web server talking to your database server and sending data to other sources is much easier and manageable.
Being that you have a low ID, I expect you are Old like me, ho
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I can understand the desire to create a desktop application. But why tie yourself to Windows? I would be especially concerned if you're embedding Windows into something like a cash register because Microsoft is liable to take Windows in a direction that won't work for you, and you can only buy older versions of Windows for so long before Microsoft decides they won't license new copies any longer. Or, as more recently demonstrated, could decide they suddenly won't support your hardware any longer with you
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Windows isn't as dependent to the institutions as they use to be.
Nope, it's moreso.
Sharepoint, Exchange, Teams, Skype for Business, OneDrive for Business all integrated deeply into Office and Windows with bonus points for Cloud services working best in Edge, naturally all controlled through Office365 for Business and integrated into your Domain controllers.
I have only see the intertwined mess of MS only services increase over the years, not decrease, and I have watched organisations become more and more dependent on them. My latest amazement... my organisation's domain a
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Pay them to suck up your data (Score:1)
it's getting ridiculous.
Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel (Score:5, Insightful)
And have you ever tried to make a quick CSV file? Check out this level of autism:
*Begin saving file*
The selected file type does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets.
Expected warning, though the default in Excel is to create a new workbook with multiple sheets. How arbitrary.
Google Sheets does not have this problem, nor default to more sheets until you need them
Book1.csv may contain features that are not compatible with CSV.
Fair enough, though this delay occurs every single save which means they aren't even trying to see if such features even exist.
Google sheets does not have this problem
Now I am done, so it is time to close Excel and be on my merr...
Do you want to save the changes you made to Book1.csv?
I thought I just saved them? It's not like I hit an export button like in Gimp or Photoshop.
Book1.csv may contain features that are not compatible with CSV.
ARE YOU SERIOUS? The SAME message again?
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Excel used to be MDI. At least in W10 and Office 365 it opens in separate windows now. Same process unless you start another Excel process on purpose. I recommend this if one sheet requires extensive calculations or data queries that could lock up the other workbooks.
The CSV thing is annoying. What is worse is that before Excel 2007 the scatter chart was fast and could handle 10s of thousands of rows of data with ease. Now it bogs down trying to redraw all those data points. And the trendline feature
Re:Licensing gets more "innovation" than Excel (Score:5, Informative)
A co-worker showed me a trick not so long ago. When you go to open Excel from the Start menu, hold down the shift-key.
You'll open a separate instance of Excel, which will allow you to have a second window. Not sure it would scale to a 3rd or 4th window (likely depends on our RAM).
Being able to have two windows of Excel on two monitors greatly simplifies things. Why they think Excel shouldn't have that is well beyond me.
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A co-worker showed me a trick not so long ago. When you go to open Excel from the Start menu, hold down the shift-key.
No need to hold down anything. If you open Excel from the start menu, from the exe file, or by middle clicking the task bar icon it always defaults to a new instance. Its only double clicking a file that defaults to opening in an existing instance.
Why they think Excel shouldn't have that is well beyond me.
Interaction between workbooks is not seamless if they are in separate instances. You can't reference from a workbook in another instance as it is external to the application.
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You think that's bad.
Open a CSV of US addresses that have some in the northeast (or Puerto Rico).
Oh look, it's already not displaying the file, fun...
Hit Control-S to save
Oh cool, not there has been alterations to a file you didn't touch that are irreversible.
Also works with ISBNs
Somebody decided that the best way for Excel to behave was that if you open a supported file format (and common data interchange one for mailing), do nothing, and hit save, there's been permanent data loss. I don't know who made th
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That may be, but there are still a lot of lurking compatibility problems which means when you're collaborating with people and organizations that use MS-Office, it can quickly turn into a nightmare. Formatting gets screwed, file corruption can happen. LibreOffice is a ways away from a level of interoperability that could make it a solid choice for us. For my personal use, it does everything I need. Heck, Google Docs is close enough that I can do most of my work in that if I want. But unfortunately, when it
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Funny true story.
I used to be the guy that fixed corrupted Microsoft documents that would no longer load.
I fixed them by loading them in to Openoffice and simply resaving them in Word format.
They would often crash Word when it tried to load them.
The documents usually looked identical or had a few graphics moved around.
Which was fine- one of the reasons word documents crashed then was overlapping graphics boxes.
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Pretty short term problem, as MS did ship compatibility filters for Office 2007+ formats for older versions of Word. Yes, interoperability between versions, particular from the transition from doc to docx was problematic, and I'd say 95% of the time OpenOffice/LibreOffice can handle MS's file formats. The problem is the 5%, and that's where our problems stemmed from. In the end, everyone was upgraded to Office 2010, which still does handle the newer variants of OOXML found in Office 2013 and 2016 without mu
This is great! (Score:3)
I gotta say, Microsoft has been doing a superb job lately with all their Linux promotion efforts! ;)
You had your chance (Score:4, Insightful)
Quit selling us half-baked versions then! (Score:5, Informative)
Our company uses Office 365 and Microsoft hosted Exchange email. The hosting part isn't so bad, really. Yeah, it gets really expensive when you have a lot of mailboxes -- but it works far better than the 3rd. party Exchange hosting services we used or considered previously. (Many of the remaining Exchange mail hosts are really "legacy" providers who still have enough clients so it doesn't make sense for them to shut down operations yet. But they're typically still using an older version of Exchange server that's not fully compatible with the latest features in Outlook, and won't give you as much flexibility to change things in the admin control panels as Microsoft does on their own service.)
What drives me crazy though is how the Office 2016 for Mac and Windows code-base was so lacking in features. We paid a lot of money to upgrade to it via O365 subscription vs. using our existing Office 2011 for Mac and 2013 for Windows licenses. And it felt like we lost as many features as we gained with it. Until pretty recently, Microsoft didn't even put back features as basic as allowing images to be inserted in headers or footers of Excel documents! They also broke a lot of font format related stuff on the Mac side, because they decided to scrap the old way of using a proprietary font rendering engine that was part of the code in Office 2011 and earlier, in favor of using native OS X font rendering functionality. I think this was a good move, except people's carefully crafted Outlook message signature lines got mangled and needed to be re-worked.
I'm sure we'll pay the asking price and migrate to Office 2019 eventually, since we're pretty committed to the whole Office suite after over 15 years of employees using it for the majority of our corporate documents and messaging. But I'd really like to see Microsoft do better about not subtracting features that used to work in old versions of the software and charging us money to do it!
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What drives me crazy though is how the Office 2016 for Mac and Windows code-base was so lacking in features. (...) I'm sure we'll pay the asking price and migrate to Office 2019 eventually
Aka "Thank you sir, may I have another." why would Microsoft do that when you're giving them money anyway?
Because they can (Score:2)
Obligatory quote... (Score:2)
Perhaps you feel unfairly treated? .....
I am altering the deal... Pray I don't alter it any further.
But they will, they will.
I've been on LibreOffice for years now (Score:1)
It's free and it fills all my needs.
I understand the need to have word if you are at an office that has word.
But ... when I was I bought full Office 2010 for $10.
And I've never used it at home. Just wasn't necessary.
Public money (Score:1)
I asked once someone with a permanent position at cern, why do they have so great ties with MS, when they (back then it was SLCE) can even have their own distro, with collaboration ofc with other labs like Fermilab?
Why can't they just take a stack of the public money they give to MS for various shitty services, like skype for business, and give it one year to libreoffice and ask them to add X functionality if needed and with the rest just polish the suite?
Why don't they do the same with a chat/video confere
Since it is becoming increasingly difficult... (Score:2)
.. to actually own your software, there is little stopping the proverbial landlord from raising your rent once you're nice and comfortable in your apartment. So to speak.
Welcome to the Office Party (Score:2)
So now that Microsoft is buried balls deep in your company, they're vigorously driving home the point that you now have a business partner whether you wanted one or not. And this one has no responsibility whatsoever to you or your business.
Just Absurd (Score:1)
What does 'per user' mean ? (Score:2)
If two people job share (eg one mornings, the other afternoons) and they thus sit at the same desk and use the same PC: is the cost twice $84 per year ? If so: why ?
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If two people job share (eg one mornings, the other afternoons) and they thus sit at the same desk and use the same PC: is the cost twice $84 per year ? If so: why ?
Yes.
Because the organization chose per user licensing this specific example would cost more than choosing a per device license.
As a counter-example: My wife's employer chose per user licensing. She can use MS Office on her desktop at work, on a laptop, or on her desktop at home using the 1 license which is tied to her user ID, instead of purchasing 3 separate licenses for each of the three devices.
It is a trade-off. Choose whichever licensing model best meets your organization's needs.
The summary doesn't
People are still using that? (Score:2)
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Hope Outlook 2019 is better than 2016 (Score:2)