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Just for fun; I recorded a macro in LibreOffice Basic that sets the text in a cell.

This is a sample:

  dispatcher = createUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")

  dim args1(0) as new com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
  args1(0).Name = "ToPoint"
  args1(0).Value = "$C$7"

  dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:GoToCell", "", 0, args1())

That first line is confusing and obsolete. Sun doesn't exist any more, it is two generations of branding from being StarOffice, and good luck figuring out why the service is named after a card game. Even a programmer isn't going to figure all that out without knowing the history of the project.

Now in MS Office I'm pretty sure this would be something like ActiveSheet.Cells(1, 5) = "foo". There is nearly no discovery for the LO Basic equivalent 'sheet.getCellByPosition(3,16) = "foo"'.

It really is worlds apart. I don't see how a moderately sophisticated user can learn to write LO macros without finding a reference manual and investing hours orienting themselves. I've seen people teach themselves to a useful standard using MS Office macro recordings.

EDIT More importantly, a novice wouldn't necessarily understand that the recorded macro isn't the accepted way to select a cell. Even realising that a cell can be selected with one line is hindered by the LO macro recording.

They really need to make an easier and modern way of scripting in LO.

Macro-programming Office documents is one of those things that should immediately elicit the question "Is there a better solution?" There almost always is. Office documents are an extremely poor workflow and a terrible artifact for data.

Which is why replacements seldom have more than the most trivial of automation -- the people who are making the move usually change their workflows. The offices that built around Office 95 are, however, still doing things the way they always do.

EDIT: What a changed world when this is a contentious comment.

What is a "better" solution? If a macro-programmed office document is doing its job, what constitutes "better"?

Why scarequote better twice? It is possible, you understand, for some solutions to be better than others.

In 2017 there are shockingly few cases where macro programming an Office document is an ideal solution, and it is usually a really clear sign that you're approaching the problem wrong. It was seldom a good solution even in 2010.

It's funny that in these conversations people always bring up finance. I work in finance, for a wide variety of companies making a wide variety of solutions. Excel automation is a curse. Every Excel automation is an abomination from a decade plus earlier -- islands of data, extraordinarily full of errors, security nightmares, data exposure risks, and on and on.

This. I don't think those automated Excel spreadsheets are doing as great a job as people think. Every time I've been brought in to try and migrate people away from these kind of solutions, we've exposed many bugs. Some not a big deal, others costing the company real money.

The thing is, it can be done by a "non programmer" without IT or admin overhead. Building or buying a new solution outside of Office requires far more buy-in and cost.

It may not be the best workflow, but it is the most accessible one for an individual to start with.

Edit: for what it's worth, I agree that it can be a hindrance to a company when it becomes a core operating process. However, that doesn't mean that it is inherently wrong for many needs

Sure, I get where it comes into play. A team usually has the "techie" guy who decides to roll some macros, and soon it becomes embedded. In the last decade and before this was the engine of an enormous amount of end user computing.

But in 2017, it is almost always a very bad sign. Which is why the competition have mostly abandoned automation of the 1990s Office sort.

Wow; that is horribly unreadable. :-(

That's a ridiculous level of verbosity for what should be the most basic of tasks. Not to mention is has its roots in Java. I would have figured that LibreOffice, which is touted as an MS Office replacement would have full compatibility with Macros written in VB.

Doomed in this context doesn't mean "is extinguished from all use". For instance, CAD is an absolutely tiny usage of an OS. Minuscule.

Office...I'm in finance and massive numbers of people are either working on ancient versions of Office, or they've transitioned to alternatives. Office is absolutely enormous in scope, but it's one of those things that is detrimental to many workflows because of its powers. Many shops prefer webapps and on-demand generated consumables. Even Excel is very rapidly dying.

The criticality of Windows has absolutely imploded, and is nothing like it was. If someone wants to use Linux, or OSX, or Android, or whatever, in most cases it fits in many workflows with absolutely no issues.

On the home front the single thing keeping Windows running in most home situations is game compatibility. A massive number of home users never go outside of the browser, and those that do usually do just for games.

I definitely fall under your last point. As soon as I can play my entire Steam library on a Mac or Linux, I'll make the switch. Until then, I'm stuck on Windows.

"Windows is doomed" doesn't mean windows is going away. As long as its market is stagnant and it isn't picking up new domains while it's competitors (linux, OS X, android) are, it becomes just a piece of legacy technology that has to stick around but isn't going anywhere. There are very good reasons why Windows tried going with mobile, IoT, and AR/MR for its future growth.

"Doomed" means a slow eventual death, not an immediate one. This reminds me of how people were so busy knocking down strawmen with the whole post-PC thing.

I think that a significant reduction to the user base may actually lead to Microsoft actually stopping all further development of windows, because I believe that the cost of developing, updating, and securing windows is massive.

They have enough market to justify continued development at a slower pace, but windev (OSG?) is no longer going to have growing profit and they would probably cut back on R&D and focus on ASG and C&E where profit growth is happening.

Reading the article, the problem becomes more obvious: without mobile, they have a huge gap in their offering and have to embrace competing OS's (Cortana goes nowhere with a non mobile windows).

Pardon my ignorance but what's OSG, ASG or C&E?

If "doomed" means a slow eventual death, absolutely everything has been doomed from the start.

Yes, death is inevitable. The trick is, can you tell where your life rise ends and your fall begins? Doomed is typically identified at or after that point.

Windows hasn't been on the upswing since the early 2000s. According to this definition, the product has been doomed for over half its life.

Having worked at Microsoft from 2007 to 2016, I definitely saw windows during my almost tenure go from a growing profit center to all of a sudden having losses.

I don't disagree with your thesis, but I think that your bullet points are weak. But I do think that is illustrates the real point. It's going to take a lot of little things to change before windows is doomed.

However, I do see it as a possibility that windows being doomed as a consumer OS might happen in our lifetime. As more things move to service oriented and more devices become connected it's very plausible that the majority drop their desktops and laptops and rely on mobile and chrombook level devices.

Moving the entire world's manufacturing processes is not a "little thing to change". Same thing with Active Directory - millions of people work through this system, it's no small task to transition them to something else.

It's not doomed as a consumer OS. People want to use the same OS at home that they do at work, it feels familiar to them and they already know how to get stuff done.

If you think that having a real alternative to Office is a minor point, than you haven't worked in a corporate environment, and I'm not talking about Internet companies, but traditional medium-sized engineering companies, accounting, legal studios, government agencies etc...

Millions of professionals very good at their jobs, but with no particular technical proficiency, have been using Word and Excel for years, and convincing them to switch to something else would take much more effort that any IT manager with a budget can possibly muster.

Most CAD programs work on Mac. It's just 2x-4x more expensive to buy comparable Apple hardware that runs it.

I agree that the scripting is a moat around Window's dominance but most small businesses run Windows because the hardware is more affordable and a lot of people are comfortable with Windows. Office is also super cheap now and free alternatives kind of suck and they address common pain points incrementally better than they did 10 years ago. In other words, it doesn't feel like free Office alternatives are keeping up. For example, LibreOffice stopped trying to improve compatibility with MS Office documents. I get the philosophical reasons but if you want to migrate end-users, you have to care about things like that.

At my son's public school, he was being taught to use Google Docs because (of course) it's more affordable than buying a bunch of copies of Microsoft Office for the kids. He was doing homework one day and he was trying to do some common formatting thing in Google Docs. Can't remember specifics. After a few minutes of trying to help him figure it out, I was like "let me introduce you to this little program called Microsoft Word". It blew his mind after using Google Docs.

I think CAD is a great example, because CAD products do exist for Mac OSX, which at this point is the only viable competitor to Windows, even including a 2015 port of AutoCAD. BIM exist, like ArchiCAD. It's not that the Mac is a complete dead end, but the resources required to target the Mac are non-trivial and it has to be worth the investment.

For years high end Unix workstations dominated in the 3D graphics and design field, in engineering, industrial design and fabrication, basically anywhere a computer+engineer generated the kind of income which justified a $50,000 computer (epitomized by SGIs and Dec Alphas) plus equally or more expensive software licenses.

What happened is the bottom dropped out of the hardware market. The Pentium Pro came along, Windows NT 4.0 was released with OpenGL support, Nvidia brought powerful 3D to the consumer desktop, computers with 256MB or more of RAM were commonplace, and all of this was available for a few thousand dollars. Over time, almost everyone making software for these platforms either jumped ship or went broken.

So while there's a historical precedent for this same migration in the computer field, something's different this time. There's no room at the bottom.

> common CAD software

OnShape is a viable online replacement for SolidWorks but it is hard to transition people from their favorite software package.

CAD is not the biggest deal and is not a major factor, even if some people think it is. Less than 1% of corporate office computer workers are CAD and it is probably way less than that even.

Office and Active Directory are a big deal though.

CAD isn't the only major program though.

Adobe Suite is another major factor: Wacom Tablets are still superior to iPad Pencil and Surface Pen (although the Surface Pen provides a cheap entrypoint for these programs). And nothing on iPad has the featureset of Photoshop (or Manga Studio or whatever you prefer)

Non-CAD programs like Blender, or Maya and whatever, are still best on a PC.

----------

And as long as you're using PC software, you'll need an IT department that supports enterprise PC operations. Active Directory and Group Policy really does make life easier for any IT Administrator who is in charge of 100 to 1000 computers.

Both the adobe suite and Wacom tablets work on Mac, not sure what you’re trying to say here.

I'm sorry, but OnShape doesn't even come close. We don't even have to start talking about the functionality. The fact that there's no sane PLM options instantly kills it for corporate customers, and it will stay that way until there is.

Do the official online versions of Office qualify as viable alternatives, or could they potentially be in the future?

Obviously this would require Microsoft themselves to undercut Windows, but Office is such a cash cow for them, they might see it as worthwhile.

I think they'd be quite happy to undercut Desktop/Mobile Windows in favour of Office. Long term Office may be the most viable product. There are already online and mobile versions that don;t require anything Windows related (they aren't feature complete yet by any means, but that will eventually change).

Even Server Windows to an extent if their other on-prem cache cow (SQL Server) does well on Linux.

Windows is not their core priority these days. The Azure platform is, and Windows is just a part of that which could be swapped out. Maybe Windows will just become a free (though obviously not Free) product, with the money coming in from Azure + SQL + Office.

Exactly my thinking. Office probably has more legs. Attempting to keep it tied to Windows in order to save Windows could end up bringing both down, and I think they know this.

Back in the bad old days, Microsoft could barely be convinced to keep a Mac port of Office going, and that was basically to keep the government at bay. But they seem to be more open now.

COBAL was doomed 30 years ago, it's still not quite 100% dead yet. But, it might as well be.

Windows is on the same path in part from the windows 10 fiasco, but also from the stagnation in computing hardware.

Consider Direct X with ever improving hardware it's was a hard target to keep up with. But, now they would have to make changes for the sake of change while providing backward compatibility...

If we could run entirely in a web browsers, it's a real alternative for everything. Probably Web Assembly might be the answer.