They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
Not as noticeable on light mode but a constant distracting reminder about how much Microslop sucks on dark mode.
I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything.
And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.
Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist.
But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
It became so insanely expensive my work started making us apply for 3 month licenses until we gave up and found something else.
About 15 years ago my Industry was using MS Visio for every diagram.
But they updated the GUI entirely and nobody could be bothered with the new format.
Now people use DrawIO and MS Visio is forgotten.
I don't condone or like this kind of thing from MS. We all know though who MS copies...
You support the company that perfected it. So pot meet kettle.
"Why do people still buy Microsoft?" Because admins can make weird configuration settings.
(Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)
Don't forget: https://www.libreoffice.org/
MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license.
This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Well, Baby steps I guess?
I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application.
What have we become?
Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.
People will (correctly) complain about jankiness and bullshit associated with Linux, but simply forget that Windows Update bricked their computer because their developers do not understand secure boot, or how they broke copypaste, or how they broke Notepad, or how the Windows "Repair Tools" have never worked for anyone in history.
Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, but I do feel like I still put up with less garbage from it than people do with Windows. Also, even if I do get some garbage from it, you know what's cool? Snapshots actually work, something you cannot say about Windows System Restore.
Bit of a shameless bit of self-promotion, but.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401
Heck, you can use cracked Windows on any compatible machine. Can you do that with MacOS? Apple is selfish, it wants to control the entire chain.
We Hate You Microsoft.
Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.
- Client says they added me already, but I have no email with an invite. Turns out I didn't have an account that had previously joined Teams with a personal account.
- But even after I created a teams account, due to the order of events (added to corp account as guest, then created a teams account), I still don't have access and need to be readded.
- I can't upload images on groups because I don't have OneDrive access, WTF?
- I cannot download transcripts of meetings I join because I don't have permission.
How bad can a software be? Really?
Also, just quickly poking through their various enterprise plans (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...), I found several that offered Web & Windows but not Mac, and none that only allowed editing on Web like you describe.
TutleCpt•45m ago
hosel•39m ago
jbubimon•19m ago
Criminal all the way down.
tombert•8m ago
If a job pays really really well, then sure I will run Windows, but short of that I'm going to opt for Mac, or I'm going to try and figure out a way to replace the Windows with a Linux.