Why quoting Robin Williams is relevant here?
He seems some kind of actor. Are you quoting his fantasy how Bill Gates thinks?
Its the same story since like 15+ years now.
My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.
I can’t imagine going back to a time where I couldn’t just throw an excel file or ppt in a discussion and get collaborative editing straight away.
At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?
Lucid is a better tool in every way.
In the same way that their incompetence has been very slow to move the needle, once they lose the market it’s going to be almost impossible to get it back.
The upside is that MS has the reserves and fallbacks to get their shit together if they realized that they are faced with a bad sitation and those that can't leave will get better products.
I happen to use Windows on both personal and work laptop. Some of the bugs I see exist across Home and Enterprise version. Sleep remains a nightmare on Windows, and yes across laptops made by different manufacturers. I have created tickets and this, and IT doesn't have a solution.
Personally, I have decided that my next laptop definitely won't run Windows, and if I am allowed to ask for a Mac machine at work in the future, I'll jump at that opportunity.
That would mean two fewer Windows licenses and less usage of related products (good riddance, Edge!). And I am sure I am not the only one who is thinking about all this.
But of course I have no idea if that matters in the grand scheme of things -- after all, many people tolerate these bugs just like they tolerate all the ads by Microsoft, Google, Meta etc.
An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
There were of course even more roles in the prehistory, but if we think the 2000s, I can count at least: RDB design and management; planning and specification work; interfacing with the customer; testing; merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack"; merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and, as such, sacrosanct.
Remember Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, developers, developers" (in about 2000)? That's why.
I'm not saying I totally agree (although I think I do at least a bit), just that this is hardly new.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/the-real-story-behi...
I have a relatively small workforce and office management platform. When MS Places was announced, we thought it was the end. We had a good run, but now one of the big players has entered the market and will wipe out all competition with a single swipe.
Anyway, it sucks. Potential customers who had waited for months tried to use it and immediately sought alternatives. Existing customers who told us they tried to use it and for one reason or another, gave up.
But it seems Microsoft's MO has been 'customer driven testing' for as long as i can remember.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth, it needs to reorg in a way that allows its very distinct pieces to function correctly. I wish Microsoft would let Bethesda have full autonomy.
Starfield's main problem was the shallow content which is very unlike Bethesda. Skyrim, for all its faults and issues, had so much to discover. As did the previous entries in the series. As did Fallout.
I think the constant content downgrade has been going on for a long time.
dude250711•2h ago
jillesvangurp•1h ago
There's an opportunity to automate some of the QA traditionally done manually. I tried this last week on our main app (not some toy thing):
(turn on agent mode in chat gpt)
I was being lazy here with my prompting. But it works shockingly well on anything browser based. It will start using whatever you point it at and do things that normal users might do. Obviously, you can give it more detailed guidelines on what to test, what to ensure is working, etc.I got a pretty detailed report back and most of it was valid/constructive. I'm planning to do more of this. It beats developers doing QA (they are too biased usually and seem reluctant to do it) and we don't have any dedicated QA people. Manual QA can be very expensive. I don't think the need for that totally goes away, but you should probably focus that on the most valuable/hardest things to test.
In any case, it's pretty cool to watch Chat GPT explore a UI and attempting to use features. It's very thorough and it seems to figure out workarounds for UX issues as well when things don't work as expected. This is exactly the kind of stuff that developers testing their own UIs are blind to. They know where to click and don't even think about it.
A related issue is actually updating documentation and marketing material with up-to date screen captures and screenshots. Annoyingly, Chat GPT doesn't allow me to save the videos it takes of the AI using the browser. But that stuff could actually be documentation gold. Doing this manually is very tedious.